Planes by Peter C. Baker

Published by Knopf on May 31, 2022

Planes begins by inserting the reader in the head of an Italian woman who changed her name from Maria to Amira when she converted to Islam after marrying Ayoub. Amira did not convert because she has any strong religious belief but because she thought supporting Ayoub’s religion would give him stability and strengthen their marriage.

In the opening pages, we learn that Amira is living alone. She is saying at least some of her daily prayers to feel closer to her husband. Ayoub has been detained without charges for two years, presumably on suspicion of terrorism. His lawyer believes he’s being held in a prison in Morocco, but his heavily censored and irregularly delivered letters reveal little about his life.

The first section of the novel reveals Amira’s fear that everyone in her neighborhood is judging her for being married to a terrorist. She is also afraid to be seen with a friend from her childhood, the boy who took her virginity and who has resurfaced in Rome. Amira is scraping by, using all her earnings to pay rent to maintain their apartment in the hope that Ayoub will return, allowing them to resume their life together in a familiar environment.

The novel then begins a journey through the lives of connected characters — the kind of characters who dominate mainstream American fiction. Melanie is liberal who serves on a school board in Springwater, North Carolina. The long-term best friends of Melanie and her husband Art bonded years ago over their commitment to social activism, but now their friendship seems like a habit. Melanie is tasked with making a compromise with Bradley Welk, a Republican member of the school board, so naturally they end up negotiating in bed. The affair becomes complicated. That’s the nature of affairs.

When the story circles back to Amira, we get Ayoub’s backstory. He is working in a pizza shop when Amira first meets him. She is bored and looking for a “symbol of difference. A new thing. A discovery. Foreign.” The story follows their marriage and the developments that strain it, beginning with all the people who tell her it is wrong to marry a Pakistani or any Muslim. Their story eventually returns to the present.

How are the stories linked? The plane that transported Ayoub from Italy to the secret prison in Morocco took off from Springwater, using a local air charter service that is a CIA front. Local residents were in the dark about the charter service, except perhaps for Welk, who is listed as one of its owners. It’s bad enough to have an affair but having an affair with someone who enables torture is particularly rough for a liberal, compounding Melanie’s anxiety about her selfish choice.

The best scenes in the novel involve Ayoub’s attachment to a stray cat — a cat that, like Ayoub, survives deep wounds and needs to be healed, a cat that brings back memories of a cat who served as a symbol of love in a place of darkness — and Amira’s resentment that Ayoub does not display the same attachment to her.

Planes benefits from Peter Baker’s fluid prose and careful exploration of how a false accusation of terrorism devastates lives. The Springfield characters are also built with solid characterization, but their story is familiar and less interesting. My knock on the novel is Baker’s complete failure to resolve any of its storylines. That’s a trend in modern novels, a reflection of the reality that each moment in life is a shapshot in time and who knows what might happen next? The high school teachers who told us that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end turned out to be wrong, at least to modern novelists who see no need to work out endings. Still, it’s frustrating not to have at least a partial resolution of at least one storyline. Characterization and fluid prose earn Planes a recommendation, but the novel isn’t for readers want to know what happens next.

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