The Coin

Starred review from May 15, 2024
A wealthy young woman drifts through New York in a stupor of designer clothes and high-end beauty products. Though stunningly unqualified, she teaches (barely) at a private school for "underprivileged" boys while mocking American child rearing. To toughen her students, she allows a guest speaker to ridicule their clothes and assigns emotionally demanding essays. She floats between two singularly unimpressive men and joins a pyramid scam selling designer purses. Yet her rootlessness is not without cause, for she is Palestinian, and displacement is endemic to the Palestinian experience. "I come from a land that is a graveyard," she muses, a place where "the women in my family placed a lot of importance on being clean, perhaps because there was little else they could control in their lives." Fittingly, her anxiety manifests in a morbid fear of dirt and obsessive cleansing rituals. When past and present, self-indulgence and self-loathing collide, the result is a bold and terrifying reinvention. First-time novelist Zaher wields her journalist's eye to elevate the callous distance from everyday horror: "As we were driving up, it was reported that fifty-five people were killed in Gaza, and I felt a pinch in my chest. But when I looked up at the trees, at the sky, I saw that nothing was changed." Brilliant.

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Starred review from May 13, 2024
In Zaher’s hypnotic debut, an obsessive Palestinian woman flees her oppressive homeland for Manhattan and employs increasingly unorthodox methods to teach English at the private school where she works. The unnamed narrator lives comfortably on an allowance from the estate of her parents, who died years earlier in a car accident. She fills her free time with elaborate ablutions and stays up late cleaning and organizing her apartment, to the point that she’s so exhausted during class she can’t stay on her feet. Disregarding the standard curriculum in favor of harsh life lessons (love is akin to being “taken hostage”), she gives her students bizarre assignments such as extracting confessions from their family members. She chalks up her strange behavior to a coin she remembers swallowing as a child, which she imagines remains lodged in her back. Zaher’s writing is deeply arresting, especially when her narrator is energized by her newfound sense of self-possession in New York, where she walks the streets wearing a “violent” and “sexual” perfume and carries a Birkin bag, which thrillingly transforms her into an object of desire (“I came from a place where a bag could never have power, where only violence spoke. And suddenly I had something that others wanted to possess, I was a woman who others wanted to embody”). It’s a tour de force. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House.