THE COIN

A woman in search of herself.

Palestinian journalist Zaher makes an absorbing fiction debut with a disquieting tale about race, class, morality, and artifice. Her narrator is a young Palestinian woman who finds herself in New York, teaching Black and immigrant middle school students. Hugely wealthy, although without access to an inheritance of more than $28 million because of the terms of her father’s will, she lives on a monthly allowance doled out by her brother. As a friend remarks, she is “simultaneously rich and poor.” Intent on looking “consistently chic and expensive,” she wears designer clothing: Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Miu Miu, Chloé, Fendi, and so much more. She is also simultaneously Black and white, a light-skinned Arab with a “deceiving complexion” that masks her true identity: an émigré with a troubled connection to her “biblical homeland” and to a current home she finds alienating. “I was scared of American culture,” she admits. “When I say that, I don’t mean the right to bear arms, I mean wedding dresses and obesity.” Emotionally isolated and culturally estranged, she becomes obsessed with dirt. “I’m a moral woman,” she says, “…all I want is to be clean.” Zaher lavishes much attention on the narrator’s constant scrubbing, bleaching, and abrading; she rubs herself raw. Her compulsion for cleanliness, she realizes, was instilled by the women she recalls growing up, who “placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives.” Her own sense of control erodes after she becomes caught up in a pyramid scheme involving the resale of Birkin bags. “Fashion is pretense,” she comes to realize, “education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense.” In search of her “true essence,” she withdraws into self-flagellating solitude that leads to the novel’s shattering conclusion.

A perilous journey, rendered in sensuous prose.