My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Life and love are messy and, sometimes, it takes the death of someone close to us to make us understand the beauty in the messiness. In this 2019 finalist for the National Book Award, Ms. Lalami explores themes of life, love, grief, and deferred dreams with a dash of 2019 racial politics thrown in.
Late one evening in the Mojave Desert, a Moroccan immigrant, Driss Guerraoui, is killed in a hit-and-run and his family are left without a father and husband. His daughter, a struggling musician named Nora, returns home to grieve with her family. Jeremy Gorecki, a local sheriff deputy and Iraq War veteran who has had a crush on Nora since high school, strikes up a relationship with her. And an undocumented immigrant, the only witness to Driss' death, weighs whether or not to tell the police what he saw. Other characters tell their own part in the story, including Driss, but to say more would give away to many details and I fear that this description may even give one the impression that this is a mystery or thriller. Although the mystery of Driss' death forms a kind of narrative spine to the novel, this is not a mystery or a thriller. Indeed, the book does not spend much time trying to solve the mystery. Instead, the book focuses mostly on Nora's grief, the growing relationship between Nora and Jeremy, and the complicated feelings Nora has for the rest of her family.
This is a slow novel and I mean that as a compliment. Although the climax of the book comes within the last 50-60 pages and most of the chapters are relatively short, at no point does this book feel rushed. Instead, there is a deliberate pacing where we see things from each of the POV characters' viewpoint. This allows the reader to feel more intimately connected with each character. Indeed, by the end of the novel, I admired almost every character and sympathized with their struggles. If you don't feel anything for these characters, you may need to have a doctor check you for a heart.
The only thing that keeps me from giving this book a full five stars is this one plot point having to do with Driss' recent past. When this piece of information about Driss is revealed about a third of the way through, it hits like a bombshell, exceeded only by the final missing clue from the hit-and-run. It is such a big reveal in such an early part of the book that I thought it would play a bigger role in the overall story and I wouldn't blame anyone else for thinking so. Instead, it is almost completely forgotten within 20-30 pages and doesn't resurface until the very end of the novel. It does fit in with Ms. Lalami's theme about the messiness of love and family, but I felt that it was too big of plot reveal to just leave by the wayside.
Though I am not one who usually reads contemporary fiction, this novel was a pleasure to read from beginning to end. Each character was drawn well and the plot moves at a slow, but deliberate, pace. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a good example of contemporary literature done right.
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