This novel has been a hard one to write a review for. Mostly because of the upheavals happening, and my subsequent desire to try and locate the text as best as I can in the current moment. Because, reader, it truly is a novel for the times, of the times. So here is the earliest version, which I had written shortly after Valentines Day.
Mariam Rahmani’s Liquid is a literary novel that pokes fun at the conventions of literary novels while expressing enough self-awareness to recognize both the institutions of validation and space for in-depth dissection of humanities theory that the form (and its critique) enables. At its heart is a disillusioned almost-thirty year old PhD candidate grappling with both increasingly precarious job and dating markets. And I say grappling instead of struggling for a reason—Rahmani’s largely unnamed narrator spends the duration of the novel trying to claw her way to stability, to recognition, to validation of the values and priorities she has structured her whole life around. How? By deciding to go on a 100 meticulously spread-sheeted dates from all strata and tangents of LA society. But when her quest for the tangibly nebulous takes her far away to where it all began, our narrator is left with more choices than answers about what shape she wants her future to take.
If I had to make a comparison, it wouldn’t be prose. Reading this felt like slipping into a distorted space between the films Past Lives by Celine Song and Appropriate Behavior by Desiree Akhavan. The distortion is due to Rahmani’s reckoning with the creeping, growing precarity of art and its scholarship as viable careers, with the slow declines and skin-deep insecurities bred by late-stage capitalism, and what it means to live within society while being apart from, if not outright isolated* from community.
Within 304 dense but eminently readable pages, Rahmani somehow puzzle-pieces together a dizzying array of references (possibly an entire semester’s worth) from women’s-asian-middle-eastern-world-literary-medical-politics-creative-writing-gender-and-sexuality-studies**, interjected and framed with references to 90s rom-coms.
If at least 50% of that word string shows up somewhere on your CV, college transcripts, or you have experienced academic (or dating) burnout at any point, you should immediately get your hands on a copy of this book, because catharsis lies somewhere within its pages. I’d shelf this between Theodore McComb’s Uranians and Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony—the other two books I have recommended it to every queer grad student I know, including the ones in bio/pharma/medical fields. The parts of Liquid that are set in Iran’s hospital system are heart-wrenching and a keen window into the anxieties and emotions of people in many economically disenfranchised nations, as well as the minute, human impacts of healthcare inequity and inadequate access to basic care due to understaffing (in any country).
Whether it drolly observes the surreality of a white woman receiving tenure to talk about Black women’s literature, or the gender norms of millennial dating, Rahmani’s narrator strives to present a sort of cool detachment in both her narration and presentation, while never really being able to elide the spiky, sharp edges of her less than palatable emotions and actions. It’s dissociative feminism, if not at its finest, at it’s most reckoned with. K is a narrator who is unable to truly excise herself from the tangles of culture and heritage that have helped breed her disillusionment and alienation, her ongoing sense of performing herself for consumption and the frustrations this process engenders (heh). She wants to be disillusioned, to be rational, cool, clinical, academic, removed—all those words certain clades of bros have idealized and Barbara Kruger spent the 90s vehemently deconstructing. But she is not. She cannot.
Put simply, she does not have the privilege of doing so.
Dissociative Feminism is the term that came to mind when I was reading a piece about the rise in media marketed to conservative women, and/or women exhausted by their inability to “have it all” and looking for an emotional lifeline in distressing times. For some readers, the conclusion of Liquid might seem like an exercise in this new post-everything attitude, a capitulation to varied norms and normativities. But this is why we read—for the journey that contextualizes the ending, that gives a character’s choices emotional heft. This journey also raises more questions than the conclusion answers, making it a solid book club bet: how easy is the choice, when it seems antithetical to everything you’ve worked for? What forms do fantasies take? Or security? And what do you sacrifice in its pursuit? So many questions, despite a seemingly settled (heh) ending.
In the end, I find myself returning to a line in the author’s letter that came with the review copy—in it, Rahmani addresses the reader/reviewer and says that this novel is part of a conversation she grew up having with writers from Rumi to Tolstoy, with the self-mythologizing and stories of “smalltown Ohio”, “a city like Tehran” and a her own experiences navigating the precarious, politicized waters of humanities academia, advocating for language and expression even as funding grows scarcer and the future more uncertain***. As a reviewer, I feel this novel is best taken as a conversation rather than a prescription. Specifically, an accessible, emotionally difficult dialogue between the author, narrator and reader on complex themes of identity and relationships.
Liquid is a novel-length love letter to possibility, to familiarity, written in the throes of heartbreak and betrayal, by both the American Dream, the promises of progress, and complicated peaces. By interlocating these ideas within transnational, transgenerational and bonds, Rahmani asks us to consider the pursuit of each of these constructs, to converse with our own enmeshment to them. To consider the stories and languages that shape our own trajectories. And, resonantly, the comforts those narratives have to offer in times of conflict: internal, external, material and relational.
Who Will Enjoy This:
- The aforementioned intersectional theory lovers.
- Any femme who has gone through exhaustive effort to avoid epilating their upper or inner thighs while clinging onto the exhaustive demands of gender presentation with white-knuckled, perfectly manicured fingers. You will laugh, you will cringe, you might cry at the saga of K’s black tights.
- Fans of Desiree Akhavan’s Appropriate Behavior who wished it was set in American academia and addressed hierarchies of culture in America’s arts education/economy.
- Fans of Celine Song’s Past Lives who wished it was more queer and also complicated by intergenerational emotional baggage.
- Readers who want someone to commiserate with their struggles in post/graduate-level academia but do not want to burden their equally anguished classmates or peers with the weight of their emotions (few things build community like a shared vent followed by a shared meal)
Who Might Think Twice:
- Readers who don’t want to read about death. It is a heavy topic. It is touched on frequently, including the emotions and unresolved memories around it.
- Readers who cannot tolerate even the slightest whiff of MFA cant, itself a dialect of humanities jargon. Both feature heavily in Rahmani’s writing style, though are not its entirety. If anything, Liquid is probably the most accessible literary novel I have read after my own brief flirtation with such programs.
- Readers who really cannot right now with intergenerational child-of-immigrants academic validation issues and the crushing existential dread of staring at a final/capstone/thesis paper and feeling a heavy sense of futility about your life choices. I know you’re out there. Take care of yourselves.
*Rahmani’s narrator seems almost cloistered in a world of academia and dating apps for the majority of the book, far less enmeshed or in-community with both her local queer scene and Persian one than Akhavan’s character, necessitating the need for more specific comparison to the film, and the qualifier.
**If that word salad is not reflective of your educational or recreational reading history, there is also poetry and incisive observation woven in between a deep enjoyment of 90s rom-coms and the various stories we tell about desire and love. Valentines might be over, but this book is a solid read at any time of the year, cover notwithstanding.
***One of the novel’s strengths was its ability to weave the themes of its references/homages together seamlessly and sincerely while still examining them with an analytical eye. I was especially intrigued by the repeated references to Hedayat’s Blind Owl. Itself a hybrid of Iranian and Indian influences, Blind Owl’s publication history is itself a fraught narrative of identity, of translation and localization and complications that matter only to the people whose histories they entangle. The estate translation by Naveed Noori is superior to the overly Poe-inflected Penguin one, in my humble opinion – and also better captures the sensibilities Liquid is clearly inspired by. There are sequences in that feel almost dreamlike in the way slips in and out of them, seemingly physically unscathed but always psychologically excavated. By setting the novel within the protagonist’s narration, we are made privy to the biases, limiting beliefs and cultivated passions that drive that POV character’s decisions and actions.
(For all the liberties it takes with the source material, I find myself thinking back on the way Mike Flanagan’s take on Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories asks similar questions, and opts for much more visceral metaphors in answering them)
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