The Coin by Yasmin Zaher.
Genre: Psychological fiction, contemporary.
Reviewed: May 9, 2025.
Four stars.
A wealthy Palestinian woman unravels spectacularly in New York City. She is building a life for herself; she has impeccable style, meticulous hygiene, a good job, a good apartment — yet her ideal self remains just out of reach. In its pursuit, she becomes increasingly obsessed with cleanliness and purity, struggling all the while to balance her job teaching at a school for underprivileged boys, her various partners, and a scheme to illegally resell Birkin bags.

        My uncle was trying to take control of my father's inheritance, but it was impossible, my father was a scientist, he had thought of everything. My uncle showed me the safe and told me the password, which was America. I told you already, in my family, America was both the key and the curse.

I'm not exactly sure where or how to categorize this book. I appreciate that ambiguity because it really surprised me! What you get from this book isn't what you go into it expecting; in a lot of ways, it just kind of ropes you along, and you're never able to tell what turn it'll next take. I find that that's quite rare, and treasure the experience whenever I find a book that can deliver it.

"The Coin" defies a lot of convention while remaining very simple at its core, concerned only with one woman and her spectacular denouement. It's absurd and incohesive, almost a stain, in much the same way the narrator can never quite scrub the stain of America off her skin. That layer of filth is important. I would argue the novel focuses primarily on filth. The narrator is fixated on purity, performing increasingly-elaborate rituals meant to 'clean' her: she covers herself in toothpaste, she spends hours exfoliating herself with a hammam loofah, she plucks snakes of dirt from her skin and drowns them in steaming bath water, all of this to a frightfully obsessive degree.

Similarly, the whole novel is covered with a tangible layer of grime, and this comes from a very particular place; above all, the narrator is preoccupied by the presence of a coin in her body, a shekel she swallowed as a child and believes is embedded in an unreachable, dirty square between her shoulder blades. The metaphor is not subtle, but I don't critique the book for that — I feel the bluntness is very tone-appropriate. Something about these rituals in combination with the clinical way the story is told (how grammar is used was very conducive to this — for example, the run-on sentences) and the fact that it's told in short vignettes rather than long chapters (in contrast to the long-winded prose) comes together to give the whole book a really strange and unclean feel even despite its simple minimalism. Many elements of the plot feel flimsy and cheap and mired in pretense — this is, to me, the point.

        Technically, Trenchcoat was homeless. It was not exactly a choice, he was dealt a bad hand, and the game is rigged, of course, it favors the better hand and exploits the weak. But at least in appearance, Trenchcoat was wealthy. He wore a perfectly tailored suit everywhere he went, he hung around the expensive neighborhoods, he smiled courteously at old women, he spoke slowly, enunciating all of the letters. His body was lean and strong, his posture the marker of good health.
        Trenchcoat believed that one only belongs to a certain class inasmuch as one dresses, speaks, walks, shops, or takes as a certain class does. But his performance was not total. He smiled a lot, he felt comfortable in his own skin, something that made me suspicious from the beginning. Why is it that the rich are uptight and the poor are themselves?

Finally, I wanted to say that this book is really particular. As I alluded previously, the things that happen in it are really weird at times. Not fantastical, never crossing the line into truly absurd, but weird, and operate in strange, karmic cycles. It draws you into itself and its logic. I really enjoyed the role the woman's students play in this book, the weird conjunctions of them and the movement they're inspired to create.

One scene I want to discuss is one in which the woman goes upstate (is that what New Yorkers say?) with her 'partner', a man named Sasha, convinced she needs to get closer to the land to rekindle some vital connection. While there, she gets scared by a deer and realizes she doesn't know the omens of the land she's trying so half-heartedly and ineffectually to root herself in. Later on, she lies down in a stream the same way she would in her tub at home and places leeches on her skin. I found this scene disturbing, sure, but there's something really hypnotizing about the way she describes it that makes you also feel as if you're getting something essential taken out of you in the pursuit of something great. You feel drained and clean. It really stuck with me.

        I got close to the ledge and watched the city from above, the brick squares, the moving cars and yellow lines on asphalt. Sasha followed behind me. Don't you want to own a piece of America? I asked. Don't you want to own a piece of the earth? Owning an apartment is delusional, I explained, it's like breathing holy air, or drinking Zamzam water. It's like being buried in a vertical cemetery. After I said that, Sasha looked straight down, there was a police car parked on Hanson, across from the Whole Foods and the Apple store. It was always there. Look around, he answered, I'm the American dream, what more do you expect of life?