So does a turn towards stereotyping, which gives this work less emotional truthfulness than The Yacoubian Building. There's a passage that is rather clumsily anti-Jewish, a plotline that depends on believing that the city of Barack Obama is still a redoubt of Jim Crow racism, and a cameo portrait of a Texan that lacks a third dimension.

In order to make America a land of disappointments and not promise, al Aswany has to exaggerate its defects. That an author so clearsighted about Egypt, and the way in which its stunted political culture holds back its citizens, should succumb to such a partial view of America is a pity. There are all too many writers willing to draw a caricature of Uncle Sam and all too few who can give us a finely constructed realist portrait of a country such as Egypt. It is in the latter work that al Aswany excels, and it is in The Yacoubian Building that his genius really flourishes.