By
Jay Fox
Brooklyn,
NY, USA
The
Great American Novel (GAN) is likely a chimera. It’s something for which one
can strive, but it’s unlikely that it is something that one can attain (or, in
this case, create).
More
than being a novel that has reached such rarified heights of literary merit
that it should be placed in the pantheon of American literature, the GAN captures
the American experience at a specific time and place in a unique and lasting
manner. Novels that rise to the level of even being considered for the honor seep
into our culture, and one comes to know about these books through osmosis, by
watching Bugs Bunny cartoons or The Simpsons and not simply reading them
in a high school English class. They are ubiquitous. When one attempts to
harken back to a particular era of American history, these are the first points
of reference. Some of the more classic examples include Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, and The Grapes of Wrath. The
imagery contained within the pages of books has shaped how we perceive the antebellum
South, the Jazz Age, and the Dust Bowl.
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| Jay Fox |
Furthermore,
these novels tell us something about what it means to be an American. They wrestle
with the questions of who we are versus who we want to be as a nation. They
examine how we often fail to live up to the standards that we’ve set for
ourselves and the national mythology of “America” (something that was used to
buttress the ideology of capitalism and to serve as contrast to the type of
communism advocated by the Soviet Union, and now serves as contrast to Islamic
theocracy or the type of authoritarianism one finds in China or Russia). They
are not always uplifting, nor do they always applaud the kind of people we are.
Oftentimes, they challenge the notion of American exceptionalism. It’s a
national psych evaluation and a portrait, warts and all.
As
popular as the notion of the GAN continues to be, there seems to be a growing
belief that there cannot be just one, especially if one is writing about
contemporary America. This is likely tethered to the belief that life in the
United States has become too fractured and multicultural, and that the
existence of a national character or a shared ethos has largely evaporated.
There is no one story that can capture how the many pockets of culture that
exist throughout this country experience an event or our current era with any
degree of veracity. The metaphor of the country as a “melting pot” is not as
accurate as it once, and to say that any one narrative is the “American
experience” is simply not accurate.
Rather
than a melting pot, we’re more like a stew. From far away, we look uniform—a
solution. Close up, each person or culture maintains some degree of autonomy or
individuality even if we are entirely immersed within and saturated by a larger
culture. Some of us are more immersed than others, particularly those who have
only recently arrived or those who have been marginalized because of the long
list of institutional-isms that need not be recounted here.
For
those who believe that the experience of the individuals on the margins have
diverged so dramatically from one another and from those who are in privileged
positions, describing a book by an individual from any group as a GAN would
seem to give more gravitas or credence to one of those narratives. For example,
if Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) were to be given consideration for
the title, some might argue that the book could become the viewpoint of record
to which future generations return when learning about the 1990s in the United
States, effectively whitewashing other concurrent experiences from the time. They
would note that it’s rare that a book has even been considered a potential
candidate for the honor unless it was written by a white man. Even the best
novels not written by people who fall into this category get special labels,
thereby making them less universal and suggesting that only white men have the
power to speak the language of universality. For example, if a gay woman who
emigrated to the US from Ecuador wrote a novel that was arguably the GAN, it
seems likely that many critics would describe it with additional identifiers—the
Great Latinx American Novel, the Great Gay American Novel, the Great Immigrant
American Novel, and so on.
I’m
sympathetic to this line of reasoning. Canonizing a novel may inadvertently
grant the perspective of the author or the perspective contained within the book’s
text a certain level of ownership over whatever era or place is described. This
can be problematic when that perspective comes from a privileged place and
contains numerous blind spots or caricatures of types of Americans, as is the
case with Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy.
However,
to suggest that every blind spot must be filled and that every type of American
be given adequate time and attention to express how their personal identity
intersects with the notion of Americanness is not feasible. No novelist in
their right mind sets out to claim that their book contains all of America
(except for maybe Dos Passos), and no novelist currently writing would think it
possible to create one character or series of characters capable of speaking
with nuance for all Americans. We’re a confederation of states and territories
spread over 3.8 million square miles with a population of more than 325 million. There
are more than 350 languages spoken in this country and one of the professed
virtues of our culture is individualism.
Consequently,
the GAN cannot concern itself with telling the whole story of America because
it is simply doomed to fail. The same can be said of telling the entire history
of the nation. While novels that are epic in scope or follow characters through
a portion of the history of America—as was the case with something like
Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy or DeLillo’s Underworld or Morrison’s Beloved—are
clearly not precluded from consideration because they do no tell the whole
story of our history. Such a journey is not necessary to paint an accurate
picture of what it means to be American, which is ultimately what the GAN seeks
to, if not answer, then at the very least explore. If executed well, a novel of
limited scope that focuses on a specific set of characters in a time and place
can accurately depict what it is like to live the American experience and unveil
the myriad contradictions of the American character.
Laila
Lalami’s fourth novel, The Other Americans, comes very close to
accomplishing just that. It places you in a small town in the Mojave Desert in
post-9/11 America and recounts the events surrounding what appears to be a hit-and-run
on a dark stretch of highway in front of the Pantry, a diner just outside of
Joshua Tree National Park. The victim is a Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan American
who immigrated to this country in the late 1970s and was the owner and operator
of the Pantry. To tell the story, Lalami enlists nine narrators, including the
man who was killed that night, his two daughters (Nora and Salma), his wife
(Maryam), a police officer and former high school classmate of Nora’s (Jeremy),
a detective (Coleman), an undocumented immigrant who saw the car speed off that
night (Efraín), the owner of the bowling alley next door to the Pantry
(Anderson Baker), and his son (A.J.).
While
the police believe that the death is nothing more than an accident, the
victim’s youngest daughter and the novel’s primary protagonist, Nora, remains
skeptical. Though she has moved to Oakland to become a composer and left the
rural community in the Mojave behind her, only infrequently returning since
leaving for Stanford ten years beforehand, she remains somewhat suspicious of
many people within the community. The family regularly experienced not only the
quiet kind of racism, the kind that consists of slights and murmurs, but also
the kind of racism that is overt and violent. Driss’s previous business
venture, Aladdin Donuts, had been burned to the ground by an arsonist, while
Nora had her locker vandalized by A.J. in high school following 9/11. When she
returns to mourn and to sort out her father’s affairs, she gets the impression
that little has changed in the community.
Her
relationship with A.J. is particularly fraught and this is accentuated
brilliantly in a chapter where Nora enters the bowling alley owned by Anderson
to play a game. At this point in the story, tensions between the Guerraouis and
the Bakers are running high. She is clearly not in friendly territory. However,
Nora is determined to bowl a game and, in a larger sense, prove that she
belongs. She rents shoes and eventually finds a ball that is light enough for
her to use. She then puts on her bowling shoes despite having no socks, and
then begins to bowl. Overshadowing this process is the watchful glare of A.J.
Nora knows that he is watching her, that he is studying her, and that,
eventually, he will approach her.
Predictably,
she is a terrible bowler. In two frames, she only manages to strike one pin.
Before she can begin the third frame, A.J. approaches. He’s nearing 30,
composed, and ostensibly successful. While he’s not the bully he was in high
school, there continues to be something minatory about his gaze. When he
reveals the Celtic cross tattoo on his shoulder elsewhere in the novel, it’s clear
that he decided to get it for reasons beyond celebrating his Irish heritage.
“You’re
doing it all wrong,” A.J. said in a measured voice. “You need to straighten
your wrist. Let me show you.”
He
picked up a bowling ball and placed it in my hands, maneuvering my fingertips
into the holes, first my thumb, and then my ring and middle fingers. The resin
was dry and as he pushed my fingers into the ball, it scraped my skin
painfully. Fear and revulsion raced inside me. “The trick,” he was saying as he
gripped my hand and mimed swinging the ball, “is to keep your hand straight,
otherwise when you pitch the ball, the arc is off.” He was so close I could
feel his hot breath against my neck. My pulse quickened. I managed to free
myself from his grip and, with all the power I could muster, I pitched the ball
down the lane. It hit four pins.
After
the fallen pins are cleared, A.J. picks up a fifteen-pound ball and sends it
whizzing down the lane for a spare. “He turned to me. ‘Like that.’ Then he
smiled. ‘Enjoy the rest of your game.’”
On
the surface, everything about the incident seems polite and well-intentioned. Looks
are deceiving, of course. What is taking place is a demonstration of a power
dynamic. In high school, the scrawling of a racist epithet on a locker was A.J.’s
desperate and overt attempt to announce and assert his place at the top of a
power structure’s hierarchy as much as it is an attempt to exclude or
subordinate Nora, a perceived outsider. The scene at the bowling alley is far
more covert but seeks to accomplish similar goals. It is most certainly not a
tutorial on bowling; it is a demonstration of power meant to announce A.J.’s
dominance and to remind Nora of her otherness, the fact that she is not
passing.
This
sense of otherness permeates the novel, as is fitting given the title of the
book. Nora not only feels out of place in the bowling alley or during high school
or at a prestigious music festival to which she had received an invitation. She
feels herself a stranger wherever she is. This is as true in the United States
as it is in Morocco—a country to which she travels only once in her youth and
has no real connection because she was born in the US. A similar thing can be
said of her sister, Salma, who was born in Morocco, but has been in the US long
enough to be mistaken for an American while the family is visiting Casablanca.
The
remaining characters grapple with this sense of otherness, as well. It’s not
always a meditation on the immigrant experience (Efraín, Driss, Maryam, Salma,
Nora) or the black experience (Coleman) or the experience of being a woman
(Coleman, Maryam, Salma, Nora) or the experience of being a cop and a veteran (Jeremy).
Lalami also explores how some feel estranged from the country of their past
(Anderson, Driss, Maryam, Salma), how some feel estranged from an illusory past
or the life to which they feel they are entitled (A.J., Salma), and how one
feels estranged from the persona they present to the world (ostensibly
everyone). This latter point is perhaps what makes the novel speak in the
language of universality.
Unfortunately,
to wear this sense of estrangement on one’s sleeve is not possible for someone
who is trying to fit in. One must wear a proverbial mask to interact within a
culture that demands or at the very least values what it considers to be
normality. Eventually, these masks become the personae many characters strive
to be. Similarly, the characters often feel both guilty for failing to live up
to the persona and experience a certain thrill by rebelling against it. What
seems to be most insightful about Lalami’s book is not that this sense of estrangement
or desire to please/avoid the critical eye of the Other is internalized.
Rather, what is unique about Lalami’s perspective is that the Other is a
certain construct that exudes American-ness and that one’s relationship with
this imago is a necessary feature of life in America. The notion of Americanness
is a chimera, but a chimera that we all regard as real.
More
than simply being about the resurgence of overt racism or the immigrant
experience in post-9/11 America, The Other Americans ruminates on our
estrangement from a perceived singular identity, suggesting that this may
actually be a core component of the American experience.
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Jay Fox is the author of The Walls
and is a regular contributor to Stay Thirsty Magazine.