BookBrowse Reviews The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

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A whirlwind critique of 21st-century American capitalism wrapped in a glimmering diaspora narrative.

A popular choice for book jackets in recent years, perhaps especially in the historical fiction genre, is an image of a presumed female figure pictured from the neck down or from behind, omitting the specificity of facial features, suggesting a general representation of a woman from a particular setting and time. The cover of Yasmin Zaher's contemporary novel The Coin is both in this trend and outside of it, as it displays a person in a trenchcoat and glitzy heels whose face is blocked from view not by the artist's framing but by the chaotic positioning of her body. Unlike in the typical "headless woman" images, there is no sense of romance or nostalgia — no sense of place, even. The background is a plain, bold yellow. The figure stands on her left foot with her right kicked high in the air, one hand pointing upward and the other wrapped around herself as she turns away from the viewer. Is she falling, about to topple over? Is she flinging her limbs around deliberately, in ecstasy or triumph? Is she dangerous, or is she in trouble?

These questions easily apply to Zaher's first-person narrator, a young, unnamed Palestinian woman freshly adrift in New York City. She lives near her occasional lover, a Russian man named Sasha who landed her a job she isn't qualified for, teaching English at a school for underprivileged middle-grade boys, which supplements the relatively modest allowance she receives from the fortune she inherited (technically hers, but controlled by her brother) when her parents were killed in a car crash in her youth. Her passions are fashion and cleaning: an upscale but practical wardrobe, keeping her living space and laundry in order, an extensive hygiene routine. When the uncleanliness of the city and her body start to wear on her, she abandons her Burberry trenchcoat outside, finding it too dirty. She later spots a stranger wearing the coat, forms a connection with him, and begins referring to him as Trenchcoat. While she hopes their relationship will turn sexual, it instead evolves into a scheme of buying and reselling Birkin bags (see Beyond the Book), an endeavor that seems to suit her sensibilities until she tires of it. In the meantime, she is continually preoccupied with the idea that she has had a coin lodged in her back since childhood, having accidentally swallowed it on the day her parents died.

The narrator is simultaneously an outsider in America, a shrewd observer of American sociopolitical phenomena, and a sponge for aspects of Americanness she finds appealing. She criticizes parts of the culture that she sees as vulgar, like television, commercialism, gentrification. At the same time, she attempts to wield the maximum amount of power over others through her possessions and appearance. She is acutely aware of the privileges bestowed by whiteness, wealth, and heterosexuality and allows herself to be seduced by these privileges selectively, cognizant of how her Arab background meshes with them, both othering her and casting her as exotic. Displeased upon looking in the mirror to find that she looks white, she ponders how she is still lucky that her Arabness isn't too obvious, and then deliberately tans her face, "hoping for a slight bronze." At one point, she remarks, "So I started going to Whole Foods, so what, only for the tomatoes. I am, after all, Mediterranean. I had to maintain some semblance of identity."

The narrator's remarks seem engineered to provoke discomfort, to test one's reaction. She can appear unserious in a way that masks vulnerability, rarely mentioning her life before New York and condensing what details she does give into wry commentary: "I came from Palestine, which was neither a country nor the third world, it was its own thing." On other occasions, she makes comments out loud to others that are not only blunt but out of line, such as when she tells a student, "You have to always look presentable, Jay. Especially as a young Black man. People are racist, you know. But they are also stupid." She believes she can give her students a leg up in an unfair world by molding them through the right experiences, but she doesn't seem to understand how her actions are a part of that world — that "people" could include her.

It is easy to imagine how the narrator might be wounded in a way that partly explains her behavior. Her neuroses and withdrawn existence are, it seems logical to think, a mode of self-protection created by the trauma of her childhood and the abuses inflicted on her homeland. She occasionally provides evidence for this, such as when she tells someone, "The more contradictions in your life, the more complex your identity, the harder your soul, the more difficult it is to love and be loved." Yet this is almost too obvious to be a revelation. She even suggests early on that her impulse to clean is an attempt at control, in the tradition of women in her family. The coin, likewise, is a nearly self-evident symbol handed to the reader from the start, a representation of the hard, blank truth of economics and commerce born of Western imperialism that the protagonist must swallow. Zaher gives us these elements, but keeps us both too close (entrenched in her character's daily experience) and too far away (having little information outside of it) for them to tell the whole story. It is easy to understand the shape of the narrative, but difficult to parse its direction.

This narrow focus makes it possible for us to see the narrator's private moments, as she speaks frankly of everything from masturbation to contemplating suicide, while still having the unsettling feeling that we are missing something. As with the representation on the book's cover, we are more aware of her as a body, a physical and material presence, than as a person of whom we have knowledge, someone with a name and a face. The reader cannot look upon her because she is the camera. So while moments of pathos and gravitas come hard and fast in the second half, there is little room to pity the protagonist, or for her struggles to become spectacle. What we view instead is her glorious accounting of the various forms of dirt and trash swirling around her, the reality she tries to escape, and eventually, to embrace. As her obsession with ridding herself of dirt turns into a fascination with dirt itself, is she really immersing herself in the life around her, or is she still trying, in vain, to create her own contained natural order?

Zaher's writing will garner comparisons to Ottessa Moshfegh and Miranda July for its exploration of bizarre interior worlds, but its explicit rendering of a diaspora experience of empire makes it, in the words of the main character, its own thing. The societal critique that washes through The Coin by default is itself a force of nature: unrelenting and free-flowing but also soft and beautiful. Even alongside the narrator's isolation and seeming psychological decline, the humor of her monologue, which exposes vast contradictions, truths, and failures, rises to the top of her language like the residue of her long, ritualistic baths, warm and human and inevitable.

This review first ran in the July 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.