She is a jazz composer with synesthesia, a substitute teacher, a reader of James Baldwin and a graduate of Stanford. Although she is ever-present, she is elusive, a puzzle inside a puzzle. Much can be seen, but the world is crucially divided. With each chapter narrated by a different character, the novel feels fascinatingly encased in a superstructure made of glass. For Nora, in a community where resentment and mistrust have festered into enmity, there can be no accidents: It must have been murder. The lines between accident, reckless endangerment and murder are immediately blurred. But first she must wait for the police, led by the wry Detective Erica Coleman, to uncover the driver’s identity. From the very beginning, Nora is convinced this was no accident. In the spring of 2014, Driss (he goes by his middle name) is killed by a hit-and-run driver. Every morning she would throw out all her husband’s beer, and every evening he would return home with another six-pack: “He complained he was not free in his own home she said she did not feel safe in it.” Nora’s father, cheerfully resilient, bought a new restaurant, the Pantry, and nurtured it into a success: “What could be more American than that?” Nora tells us that, back then, her mother turned to the Quran for solace.

In the aftermath of 9/11, their business, Aladdin Donuts, was torched in a hate crime. “My father was killed on a spring night four years ago,” Nora Guerraoui says, “while I sat in the corner booth of a new bistro in Oakland.” Her parents, Mohammed Driss and Maryam, immigrants from Morocco, have been living near Joshua Tree National Park for 35 years. They share, too, a deep attachment to the specific landscape of the Mojave Desert. They all face obstacles to stable employment, are alienated from their neighbors and have a strong sense of being misunderstood not only by society but by their families. In fact, Lalami’s nine speakers have much in common. This is a powerful setup, raising the question of whether anyone feels that today’s America is one to which he or she belongs. Perhaps surprisingly, all of the novel’s speakers - regardless of race, class, gender, political affiliation, legal status or place of birth - see themselves as outsiders to mainstream American identity. Set in the towns of the Mojave Desert, the novel is narrated by nine different characters.

The title of Laila Lalami’s fourth novel, “The Other Americans,” perfectly sums up a unified disunity: an America suspicious of its own body politic.

Lalami the other americans