Zaher seems to be saying that in a society as unjust as this one, even acts of morality are tarnished with grime. As with the coin lodged in the narrator’s back—a smart metaphor for inherited trauma and the currency of power—no matter how hard you scrub, you can never get clean.
Sharp and disarming ... [A] wry tone ... Zaher is expert at crisp turns of phrase that reveal how brittle her narrator is ... A sturdy novel about an unsteady person is no small feat, and Zaher’s prose is remarkably controlled.
A spiraling, hallucinogenic plot ... The whiplash feels intentional, funny in an absurdist way ... The novel’s power is not in cohesion, but in chaos — in an ambience that is consistently murky, morally numbed, deceptively blasé. Throughout, her prose manages to be both deadpan and fertile ... Nothing about this book is meant to be subtle, not even its metaphors.
In lyrical and corrosive prose, this exquisite novel probes the space between the tragedy of statelessness and the neurotic glow of affluence, proving that in this overlap lies a rich and bewildering landscape of human behavior. Strange and luminous, it weaves an elegant tapestry from disparate threads, touching on class, fashion, lust, grief, and violence with wit and poise ... Funny, unnerving, and decadent.
Glamorous and unhinged ... Operates in that demystifying space of contradictions, between the two sides of the coin: capital and love, antisepsis and filth, savage nature and sanitized culture, Palestine and America ... Effortlessly astute ... Remains singular in its achievement: it transcends the crazy girl/sad girl trope common in Ottessa Moshfegh–influenced novels with an ending that feels philosophically complex, multilayered, and as humorous as it is heartbreaking.
When past and present, self-indulgence and self-loathing collide, the result is a bold and terrifying reinvention. First-time novelist Zaher wields her journalist’s eye to elevate the callous distance from everyday horror ... Brilliant.
