The Coin by Yasmin Zaher: book review
Overview: The narrator arrives in New York City with a curated designer wardrobe and her mother's Birkin bag to teach at an all boys charter school for promising underprivileged children. The narrator recounts her first eight months in New York after her lover convinces her to move from Palestine to America while on a trip together in Cuba. The novel follows her eccentric teaching practices, the middle schoolers she teaches, and the bond that she forms with a homeless man who takes a liking to her Burberry trench coat. This is a novel of a young woman's undoing that scratched a somewhat similar itch to My Year of Rest and Relaxation in a new tone. Overall: 3.5
Characters: 3 The narrator takes all the oxygen in the novel. It's a very close first person, and she has a very big personality. Everyone who comes into her life is a side event, therefore, her perspective doesn't leave much room for their development. Unfortunately, there isn't much room for her own either. We are presented a very meticulous, intentional character who is obsessed with cleanliness. She starts to feel she's covered by physical dirt and that snakes are coming off her in the shower. A big aspect of the book is that it's unclear how literal any of these experiences are, how much is a hallucination or a break from reality. I found this character removed but ultimately interesting to sit with through most of the novel as she expresses an extremely specific way of seeing the world. As Zaher tries to show the fever pitch of her undoing, the book slides for me and the character becomes less and less interesting as the book tries to reach peak "unhinged."
The most vibrant characters are the boys in her eighth grade class. Her interactions with her students, while often questionable at best, shows that the narrator does have the ability to care about people beyond herself. It's clear that she wants to make these boys lives better, and she considers them to be fully realized people, which cannot be said about the adults who populate her life. Sasha is the lover that convinced her to come to New York, but he appears and disappears at random with little note. A homeless man identified as "Trenchcoat" is folded into the narrator's life without comment, is a part of the small heist plot, and then also exits without note.
Plot: 3 I thought I'd said and meant "this book has no plot" before, but The Coin takes this to another level. I feel like this is particularly important to say because the flap copy hints at the idea of a bag heist/swindling situation that seems to be central to the narrative. Also, it promises a lot more character-driven plot that creates evolution than what's delivered in the novel. There's very little internal progression, and there's almost no external plot. This bag heist is a strange side interlude in Paris in the middle of the novel and is one of the more interesting moments in the book, but the narrator is entirely disinterested in the mechanics of the scheme itself, and that plot line is almost entirely dropped. Similarly, we wind our way through an interesting evolution with the eighth grade boys wanting to demand more for themselves, which is also dropped right at the climax. She never confronts either of these threads or the messiness in her romantic life. *spoiler to end of sentence* Instead she constructs a human terrarium in her apartment, languishes until everyone forgets her, and then one day, gets up and showers and cleans up the apartment and rejoins the world again. This ending might have felt more acceptable had the many more interesting threads not been presented earlier and then taken away.
Writing: 4 The saving grace of The Coin is that Zaher writes with an arresting and exacting voice. There's a strength in the prose that was likely the reason the book got published, and it's what kept me reading, even at points where I felt unsure or off put by other aspects of the novel. It's particularly an interesting read if you also have a side interest in fashion, as the book lingers heavily in that space as well.
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