PLANES

This affecting debut examines the impact of rendition and torture in two different cultures.

In one narrative thread, Amira, nee Maria, is an Italian woman married to Ayoub, a Moroccan who was seized by police two years ago while traveling in Pakistan, flown to a prison in his homeland, and apparently tortured, all without being charged. Amira, who changed her name and religion when she married, copes with loneliness, uncertainty, and feeling like an outsider to both Italians and Muslims. She depends on calls and emails from a U.S. lawyer working on such cases and on heavily redacted letters from Ayoub. When he’s released, he is thin, anxious, barely able to eat or work or spend time close to Amira. Meanwhile, in a town near Raleigh, North Carolina, Melanie is a real estate agent whose college-age son discovers her extramarital affair with a fellow school board official. Around the same time, roughly 2005, a couple Mel and her husband have known since they were all college activists want help mounting a campaign against a small airline in Mel’s town that is being used for rendition flights. Mel hesitates because her lover is the airline’s president. Baker, a Chicago-based writer, alternates chapters mainly between the two women, and the resulting diptych is inescapably unbalanced. Mel’s troubles can seem almost comically petty compared with Amira’s. That may be unavoidable, but it’s compounded by the fact that the North Carolina activists had nothing to do with Ayoub’s release. Don’t read those as flaws. In the real world, too, activism depends on preoccupied, ambivalent people like Mel and sometimes doesn’t seem to make a difference. And sometimes it does. An author’s note says the book was partly inspired by the work of North Carolina Stop Torture Now.

A thoughtful look at the small-scale fallout of an international issue.