Just as Memphis can claim the blues and Hollywood the silver screen, no one makes soap operas quite like the Egyptians. Throughout the Middle East, you can tune in to love-struck television serials from Cairo, even watch them in outdoor cafes from Beirut to Muscat.

It's rather fitting, then, that Alaa Al Aswany, one of Cairo's most exciting literary exports in some time, should elicit a whiff of this popular genre in his social novels. Two years ago, he made his literary debut with "The Yacoubian Building," a raucous, bawdy tale of the goings-on inside a Cairo apartment building.

He has transplanted his gaze to Chicago, conjuring a cast of emigrant Egyptians studying in the department of histology at the University of Illinois. All are struggling to make sense of America after Sept. 11. Many haven't quite left behind the habits and allegiances they acquired back home in Cairo.

As a writer, Al Aswany is more of a carpenter than a craftsman, but there's a forceful energy to his characters, whom he hammers into shape with short, blunt chapters. There's Shaymaa, a devout student from a rural village, so homesick that she nearly burns down her apartment while cooking her favorite meal. Dr. Muhammad Salah develops impotence and undergoes the very American experience of therapy.

Bouncing swiftly from one character to the next, "Chicago" (HarperCollins, 352 pages, $25.95) is a brisk read. Love affairs flare up and burn down. Long-suffering wives contemplate leaving their husbands. Pregnancy scares, masculine jousting and daughters on the lam from overprotective fathers keep up a restless pace.

But Al Aswany is after more than just light entertainment. As in Edwidge Danticat's novel "The Dew Breaker," about Haitians in America, the political legacies of Egypt follow Al Aswany's cast to Chicago. A brusque student adviser comes from the secret police. He applies interrogation techniques on students and twists and warps religious law to justify his ill treatment of his wife.

The friction between freedom and tradition makes Al Aswany's cast unpredictable in their actions. Tied still to another world, with only one another as reliable sounding boards, they each live in their own private Chicago -- a city made up less of the skyscrapers and tourist sites the city advertises to the world than the affairs and sorrows that bloom in their shadows.

Here, once again, Al Aswany proves himself to be a magnificent cultivator of their tales.

John Freeman is finishing a book on the tyranny of e-mail.