Liquid by Mariam Rahmani: book review
Overview: Liquid's narrator decides to test out the joke we've all made at one time or another. "All my problems would be solved if I married rich." After struggling to get a foothold in academia or a book deal after graduating from UCLA's PhD program, the narrator decides that marrying rich is the only way to both solve her problems and get ahead. So in the summer of her unemployment, she breaks out a spreadsheet and starts a new project. You can't marry rich without dating, and you need a large sample size to find a match, so she sets out to go on 100 dates, multiple per day, in her study period. Alongside this, there's the tension with her longtime best friend Adam and a diversion to Iran when her father has a heart attack. Liquid sets out to answer the fundamental question we're all faced with: how do we adult under these conditions? Overall: 4.25
Characters: 5 The character construction here is the masterwork of the novel. We've got the narrator who is extremely self aware but just clueless enough in the right ways to make the story tick. Or maybe not clueless. More that she's able to reveal subtle clues to the reader (like about the ongoing romantic tension with her friend Adam) because she knows all of these things. She just begins the book unable to admit them to herself. Similarly, she knows her 100 dates theory is a farce, but she embarks on it anyway because, what else is there to do? Rahmani has written a masterclass, also, in writing a smart character, something that is so often painfully fumbled. It comes down to sentence construction, an inherent knowingness, an effortless assimilation of theory and other texts in her natural thought processes, an appropriate vocabulary, and, also, I'd imagine Rahmani's very obvious intelligence of her own. There was something truly delicious about reading such a well executed novel told through the voice of a scholar. It kept me so engaged, and it never felt try hard. The narrator has a lot of layers, and that's what propels the book. It just felt incredibly juicy.
As far as additional characters, there isn't a huge cast of much importance. There are all the dates who have charmingly specific personalities that help illicit new information about our narrator. Beyond that, there's Adam, the narrator's friend from college, who is a poet that works in marketing and conveniently moved back to his native LA as she began a PhD program there. They couldn't date when they first met, and then he became embroiled in an eight year long slog of a rollercoaster relationship that kept them thoroughly friend-zoned. But this summer opens up new possibilities. In my head, for some reason, Adam very distinctly looked like a young Adam Driver. Maybe it was the name, but also he projects a very similar energy. Adam has his life together both more and less than the narrator, and they have a compelling shorthand that makes their scenes glitter in comparison to the fifty first dates.
Additionally, there's the narrator's parents that come into play heavily in the last third of the book when she goes to Iran to see her ailing father in the hospital. In this section, we more deeply explore her relationship with Iran as well as religion and how her parents' icy marriage and the rules that codified it flavor her current view on love and relationships. Every one of these characters comes off the page with depth and complexity.
Plot: 4 For a literary novel, this book has a shocking amount of plot, which, blended with the deep character work, makes for a lot of fun. Based on the description, I actually thought it was a romance at first, and I guess you could say it is. Though readers coming from true genre contemporary romance might find it a bit jarring. There's a pulse to the LA chapters between the plot device of the dates, the pressure to find fall employment, the energy of the city itself, and the obvious tension with Adam that keeps the book moving fast. I found myself sitting down to read a few pages and devouring large chunks instead because I couldn't put the book down. The only area that this isn't true, and why the book didn't achieve a full 5 stars, is the last third of the novel. I found that the chapters in Iran really drag. This is largely because she spends an extended amount of time with her father in the hospital essentially waiting for him to die. Naturally, these days are very rote and repetitive, and the same can be said of the aftermath. There is character growth that happens here and questions that she must force herself to answer on a faster time table because of what happens, but there was some repetition that could have certainly been cut or summarized. Rahmani tries to help this by shortening these chapters to manipulate the pacing, but cutting out (largely) both the dates and the sub-plot with Adam saps much of the energy the book carried making the reader start over on an entirely new plot line in an entirely new place too deep into the book. Luckily, Rahmani nails the ending, salvaging the plot in my eyes.
Writing: 4 Rahmani is clearly a very gifted writer and also a deeply intelligent person with a lot of background knowledge to be able to write this character and her academic world with such a convincing specificity. Every chapter does feel genuinely embodied, and I enjoyed many of the thoughts that arose in the final section I criticized above. I enjoyed the writing the entire time, even as I felt like the glut of similar scenes on an entirely new thread was slowing the book. While I wavered in that last third, I think I can still confidently say that this is the first book that's been published in 2025 that has wholeheartedly grabbed me and put itself in contention for the best books of the year.
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