Chicago, By Alaa Al Aswany, trans. Farouk Abdel Wahab

When The Yacoubian Building snared the attention and affection of readers around the world, it did more than alert us to the gamey and robust story-telling skills of the Egyptian dentist-turned-novelist who says that long years of listening to patients schooled him in the tragi-comedy of his compatriots' social – and often sexual – lives. Its global renown gave Alaa Al Aswany a heft at home denied to other kinds of pro-democracy dissident. The writer who diagnoses the condition of his people as – to quote a character in Chicago – "a collective depression accompanied by religious symptoms" now has the clout, and the immunity, that bestselling foreign fame can grant.

This freedom matters. Towards the close of Chicago, a bitterly satirical scene presents the ageing, slow-reacting but cosmetically-enhanced president of Egypt – a cruelly lampooned though unnamed Hosni Mubarak – on an official visit to the city. Al Aswany has won the power to land such blows. Not every critic can. Just this week, the opposition editor Ibrahim Eissa had a brief jail term confirmed for daring to publish reports on the ever-sensitive topic of Mubarak's health.

Chicago weaves its tapestry of intersecting stories from the tangled lives of a cluster of expat Egyptians. All linked by work or family to the histology department at the University of Illinois, the novel's people – medics, scientists, students, spouses and their friends – grapple with the usual obstacles that life as a short- or long-term Arab migrant in jittery post-9/11 America will bring. From the ultra-assimilated baseball fan Dr Thabit, proud to be a "genuine American, pure and without blemish", to the veiled and pious postgrad Shaymaa, each has to learn, and re-learn, a bearable style of being a visible alien in the Windy City.

Yet however carefully, even clumsily, Al Aswany sketches in Chicago's back-story as a racially-divided boom-town; however starkly – and, to be frank, improbably – he depicts the prejudice that bedevils his chief US couple (a class-of-'68 radical professor and his black, single-mother girlfriend), the leading players' thoughts and passions forever drift back to the Nile. Real Chicago hovers in the middle distance like a bold but crude cartoon.

Star heart surgeon Karam Doss, the only Coptic Christian in this cast, frets every day at the prejudice that drove him overseas and longs for Egypt to return his love for it. Student rebel Nagi plots the revolution that will topple the American-backed Pharaohs, adores his local (and Jewish) lover, but ultimately acts from Arab-nationalist zeal. Professor Salah, the tormented tragic hero, reverts to wearing the once-fashionable outfits in which he wooed an activist girlfriend in 1970s Cairo. Heavier than any American dream, "nostalgia had crushed him". Least of all can the pathetic secret agent Danana – his grades fixed to keep him eternally on campus – cut the umbilical cord that binds him to the monstrous spy chief, Safwat Shakir.

Al Aswany turns his heroines and heroes inside out and upside down. Predictably, devout Shaymaa discovers the delights, and pitfalls, of the flesh. All-American Ra'fat Thabit confronts his "oriental" possessiveness when his daughter runs off with a wastrel painter – but maybe he's right to worry? Carol, hard-pressed lover of the hippie statistician John Graham, finds a way to resolve their money troubles that will challenge his anti-bourgeois ideals. Sexual desire upends doctrine and sends the narrative hurtling along. From a lonely wife's experiments with battery-driven bliss to the Islamic theology of heavy petting, Al Aswany pays his dues to Eros as both fuel and foe of family, religion and politics.

Shamelessly, each segment of a character's tale closes on a teasing cliffhanger. The pages turn as if blown by a gale off Lake Michigan. In a vein that nods as much – so Al Aswany half-admits – to "Egyptian soap opera" as to his Cairo predecessor Naguib Mahfouz, the action peaks in a machine-gun salvo of sudden climaxes. The book's rattling readability is a tribute to Al Aswany's narrative gifts, as this translation has too many flat or clunky passages. His captivating voice can sound muffled.

Still, this gossipy banquet of human folly and nobility never lacks relish. After 30 homesick years, Dr Karam Doss continues to find American life rather like its supermarket fruit: "shiny and appetizing on the outside, but tasteless". Chicago bursts with Egyptian – if not American – flavour.