Not since I read Khashayar J. Khabushani’s emotional debut novel, I Will Greet the Sun Again, have I encountered an Iranian L.A. so familiar to me in its mildly dystopian urban-suburban geography, laconic wit, and depressive sultriness ... Rahmani’s novel turns out to be less predictable than some of the above tropes might indicate ... Whereas the California parts of this book, focused on the narrator’s various dating mishaps, feel charmingly familiar, nothing in Iran goes quite as planned ...
Rahmani is in many ways reinventing the Iranian American novel, subtly yet substantially ... Rahmani’s universe is never quiet; everything is spoken, often exhaustively and exhaustingly, in writing so electrically alive that the reader feels fully immersed in her world ... Rahmani’s realism is so ruggedly tangible, so honest to its details, that at times it’s easy to forget that this is a novel, not a memoir.
Wry, mercurial ... At times I sensed a messier, grittier narrative lurking in the background, yearning to emerge. Profound, unanswerable questions—about the academy’s relentless mistreatment of its workers, the mortifications of compulsory heterosexuality and the emotional inheritances we receive from our parents—glitter at the edges of certain passages like shards of glass, but Liquid hugs tight, in the end, to the walls of the romantic comedy, working to avoid cutting up its feet on the sharp, jagged subjects it skirts.
Incisive if predictable ... Rahmani’s attempt to straddle the line between satire, literary fiction, and rom-com doesn’t quite land, though there’s plenty of sharp cultural criticism, particularly on dating and adulthood. Fans of Elif Batuman ought to take note.
