The Coin

Genuinely unsure what I just read. The rating is only my opinion, and not a reflection of the Author's competency. Maybe this is just not for me.

The Coin belongs to that category of literary fiction that is very aware of itself: opaque, and not particularly interested in explaining anything. The Coin itself, for instance. What is it? I finished the book. I still do not know. Maybe that is the point. The point did not land.

The protagonist is a Palestinian woman living in New York. She is rich. She has issues. The author occasionally breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the reader, which would be a charming device if I had any investment in the narrator by then. I did not.

What she is, is clean. Obsessively, ritualistically clean. There is a passage dedicated to the worms that emerge from a deep scrub with a hammam loofah, which I start to get, and do want to exfoliate myself like that too. But to do it every damn day? What in the world, I did not need to read but did. She also does laundry on the same items almost daily, sometimes three rounds. No explanation given. Just to be clean. She is a freak. She also feels lowkey like a character spin off of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

She knows her brands. Luxury labels appear with the frequency of punctuation: full name, item, occasion. Maybe this is meant to establish character. It reads more like someone so obsessed and so involved in the class / elite / status game that if she were given a choice to wear clothes from Target, she might have rather been naked.

Somewhere in the middle, she and Mr. Trenchcoat devise a Birkin bag dropshipping scheme, which is objectively a more interesting premise than the rest of the book. Mr. Trenchcoat may or may not have stolen her actual trench coat at some point. Hard to determine, given how self-absorbed the narration is. The world does seem to revolve entirely around her.

She also teaches at an elite school. Her methods include nap time and open free periods, which sounds appealing until she dreams about sleeping with one of her students, who turns out to be a relative. Moving on.

Finished it anyway. Cannot explain why.