Book Review

Money pervades language. We talk about what our time is worth, whether others will get what they pay for, the cost of our own choices. In literature, too, we speak of the economy of an author’s language. One way to measure a book is to label it a national bestseller, or to gossip about the advance a writer received. The publishing industry examines its losses and gains.

The unnamed narrator of Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel The Coin thinks in such terms, her relationships a matter of their value to her, none worth more than her own company. “In my head,” she muses, “I kept a seismograph of my consumption, my generosity, my oscillating worth.” Money’s meaning changes with her moods, herself becoming money when she feels good, a companion like a wallet keeping her safe.

To the narrator, though, the best signal of money is fashion, or what fashion signals about a person’s worth. In one paragraph, she inventories her entire wardrobe, citing Marni, Chloé, Gucci, Miu Miu, Bottega Veneta, Theory, Simone Rocha, Valentino, Fendi, Prada, Alexander Wang, Brunello Cucinelli, Stella McCartney, Issey Miyake, Celine, Alexander McQueen, Max Mara, Dolce & Gabbana. After leaving her Burberry trench coat on a trash can, she meets a man who has donned it himself. As he accompanies and leads her on an international Birkin scam, she refers to him only as Trenchcoat, a sufficient name—in her eyes—to know him by.

The narrator is a Palestinian migrant to the U.S., teaching middle school in New York to a group of boys from low-income backgrounds, and on whom she tries to impart her understanding of class, appearances, and wealth through increasingly worrisome lessons that include field trips to burger joints and fashion lessons from Trenchcoat.

But if the narrator seems unlikeable, her layers only continue to unfold. “You will see that I am a moral woman,” she protests early, and if she doesn’t prove her morality, she does compel thought-provoking empathy.

A wholly original character, the woman at the center of Zaher’s novel believes that she swallowed a coin during a road trip that killed her parents, and that the coin lives in her body, a symbol of her inheritance, both a gift and a curse, much like America (“How could the devil be the dream?” she wonders). She receives a monthly allowance from her father’s will, which makes her both rich and poor. “It was a tragedy,” she concedes, “but somehow I got lucky, I was redeemed by a good inheritance.”

Zaher’s novel is unflinching, her narrator transcending unlikability into the absurd, a strange obsession with cleanliness consuming her thoughts and actions as she believes she can purify her soul and appease the coin lodged inside of her. Having left Palestine and acknowledging that her time in the U.S. will be short-lived, she is a stateless woman who primarily identifies with designer brands, the dirty-or-clean state of her apartment, the money she exudes without making or spending. She laments, “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.” She wishes to rid herself of contradictions and complexities, but she finds that if money talks, it doesn’t say the right things, or enough, or the many things she needs it to.

Instead, her own voice becomes a conduit for meaning, its trancelike narration propelling the novel forward. I became so engrossed in the momentum of the narrator’s telling that I could hardly put the book down without feeling that I should give myself over to it. The narrator encourages such compulsive reading, speaking to an unnamed “you” that is perhaps the coin she pictures within her body, but I eventually came to believe it was myself—the particular reader holding The Coin at the time.

“What I am telling you is a story of survival,” Zaher writes. “It’s important for you to know this, that I cannot be defeated, because sometimes I feel that you are testing me.” In this way, Zaher brings the reader close while holding us at a suspicious distance, considering what it means to inherit a particular identity, and whether we can ever impart that to someone else without their own prejudices and valuations intruding.

“How could I see myself as one thing,” the narrator questions, “and be another?” Trusting neither herself nor the one she addresses, she pulls the reader into her narrative, challenging us to accept complicity in the making and unmaking of one another’s worth. If, as the narrator says, “money simplifies everything,” then language only complicates, and for the better. Zaher’s novel deeply unsettled me, as only language can.