“By the time we know ourselves, we are already. That is the problem of childhood. It takes you a couple of years to grow up, to be conscious, to make decisions, and by then it’s already too late, it’s just a race against those fateful years.” In Yasmin Zaher’s enthralling debut novel The Coin, a Palestinian woman flees her homeland for a grubby, post-2016 New York in the hope of an authentic experience and a better understanding of who she might be.
This fearless quest for identity results in a bold, brash novel written with notable assurance and flair. Though the unnamed first-person narrator is steadily losing her grasp of reality, Zaher’s singular style gives shape and structure to the zany story of an elementary schoolteacher who becomes obsessively preoccupied with cleaning, both herself and her environment, as a way to manage trauma.
The narrative voice is consummately done, that of a wealthy Palestinian expat who is pleasingly eccentric and not afraid to speak up for herself and her beliefs, often in edgy, politically incorrect outbursts. In the opening chapters, she tells the reader: “I thought there was no better feeling in this world than leaving work to walk along a Manhattan avenue, wearing a violent perfume with no one waiting for you at home.” There is the sense, right from the start, of a woman who knows her mind.
But as the story unfolds, Zaher upends our views by having her protagonist engage in increasingly erratic and risky behaviours. The work of Jen Beagin, Nell Zink and another recent debut, Old Romantics by the Irish writer Maggie Armstrong, came to mind. The Coin is similarly provocative and vivid, similarly funny too, in that Zaher uses humour to illuminate serious concerns. In its darker moments, her novel has a Plath-esque quality, a young woman’s existential cry at the madness of the world.
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Zaher is a Palestinian writer and journalist with a degree in biomedical engineering from Yale University and an MFA from The New School, where she was advised by Katie Kitamura. She lives in Paris. Throughout her debut, the prose is sensual, original and charged with insight: “Art is about taste, and taste is formed by experience,” the narrator tells us at one point. “Don’t ever let anybody dictate your taste, it’s as absurd as someone dictating your memory.”
Labels are threaded cleverly through the narrative to signify wealth, status and at the same time, the preposterousness of brand capitalism. The narrator owns a Burberry trench coat, Cucinelli cashmere, faille pants from Chloé, among many other expensive items. In one respect, these are a facet of her desire to belong, except that the narrator sees through the ruse and is attuned to the costly absurdity.
Swiss luxury brand Vetements sells “sweatshop hoodies for thousands of dollars, because the young and ultrarich wanted to look like the working class. The slogan was Ugly Is Beautiful.” At the midpoint of the book, in a comic adventure subplot, the narrator becomes involved with a homeless man and his scheme to resell the famous Birkin handbags made by Hermes: “Every year, regardless of poverty, war, or famine, the price of the Birkin increases.”
Her day job as a teacher is also rich terrain where her unorthodox teaching methods, unscheduled free classes (sometimes just to sleep) and encouragement of dangerous antics among the pupils are frequently played for laughs. There is pathos too, in the young boys’ circumstances, and in their obvious desire to better their lives: “Most of my students were Black, and the rest were immigrants. Sure, they saw themselves in ads, but mostly on the subway, rarely on billboards.”
As the book progresses, the narrator starts to turn inward, cutting herself off from friends, lovers, business partners and pupils alike to begin to negotiate with her traumatic past, which no amount of obsessive washing can wipe clean. This is both a personal and political endeavour, a family history steeped in tragedy, and a Palestinian people with no place to call home. While the present-day action inside the narrator’s apartment turns ever more bizarre, the reckoning with the real world, for both character and reader, is galvanised.
The coin of the title, a physical object that the narrator believes she internalised as a child, is forced to the surface as Zaher questions the very idea of civilisation in an increasingly fractured and disturbed world. “Nature is clean,” the narrator reflects. “It’s civilisation that’s dirty.” The last quarter of this mad and brilliant story shows her desperate need for sanctuary, a garden of her own where she can finally put down roots.
