*Note: the narrator of The Coin will be referred to as The Palestinian Narrator, and the narrator of My Year of Rest and Relaxation will be referred to as The Blonde Narrator.

Among the blurbs on the back of Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin, Alice Slater writes that it is a “sordid Moshfeghian gem that revels in the squalor of NYC.” Yes, much as Ottessa Moshfegh’s now “signature” 2018 book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, revels in the same kind of squalor…also in New York. Which, no matter who the mayor is, remains an overrated cesspool. The unnamed narrator in My Year of Rest and Relaxation could sense that even while living in the city during arguably one of its most “glittering” moments in time: 2000. Though it isn’t a song from that era (like, say, Britney Spears’ “Stronger”) that Moshfegh chooses to quote at the beginning of the book. Instead, it’s Joni Mitchell’s chilling 1979 track, “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey,” pulling from it the verse, “If you’re smart or rich or lucky/Maybe you’ll beat the laws of man/But the inner laws of spirit/And the outer laws of nature/No man can/No, no man can…”

Even so, this is precisely what The Blonde Narrator tries to do throughout the tale of her attempt at hibernation for a full year (convinced that, “My hibernation was self-preservational. I thought that it was going to save my life”). So it is that, with this Mitchell lyric, Moshfegh makes her overarching theme apparent from the outset. Though it doesn’t become apparent to the reader until they spend a bit more time in the narrator’s world. The same goes for The Coin. And just as it is in My Year of Rest and Relaxation, The Coin, too, follows a nameless narrator (that namelessness being part and parcel of having no true sense of place or identity) through what can somewhat reductively be referred to as her downward spiral. Or, more accurately, her appropriate unhinged response to the grotesquerie of New York (and life itself). The city that will perennially represent excess and class disparity at its most extreme. Though the nameless narrators in both are on the spectrum of class that everyone wishes they were: wealthy. However, in the case of both narrators, that wealth is the result of an inheritance she gets when both of her parents die much sooner than they should.

For The Blonde Narrator, the back-to-back deaths occur while she’s still just a junior in college. First, her father (from cancer), then her mother (from suicide). As for the Palestinian Narrator, her inheritance comes in the form of a monthly allowance (managed by her older brother) after her scientist parents’ death in a car accident (when she’s still just a child) that she and her brother manage to survive. Indeed, she makes it clear from the first page that money is no issue—is hardly what motivates her in life (as it does most other people). No, as The Palestinian Narrator tells it, I’ve always been motivated by pleasure, never by money, because money I had enough of and pleasure one cannot possess.” Though the fact that she finds teaching junior high students at a Brooklyn school called Franklin to be “pleasurable” should be a strong indication of her masochism. And maybe even her sense of guilt over having wealth.

However, she’s quick to remind whoever it is she’s addressing (with “you” this and “you” that) throughout the book that teaching does give one a sense of power, authority. Molding minds and all that. And oh, how she molds these minds quite strangely, telling her students to write personal stories in their notebooks that are never allowed to leave the classroom, and that they can have a “free class” to do whatever they want (sleep, tinker on their phone, that sort of thing). When she’s not imparting such dubious lessons, she’s also coming across a lot like Patrick Bateman with her name-checking of brands and descriptions of beauty-oriented rituals. For example, “In the morning I brushed my teeth with a soft toothbrush and my favorite Cattier toothpaste. Then I washed my face with an oil-based cleanser, followed by toner… After work, I got in the shower and repeated the steps of the skin-care regimen under hot water.”

The narrator’s fixation on being clean (a quality that the rich are known for [if only on the exterior]—hence, an expression like “the great unwashed” referring to “common people”) is matched only by the My Year of Rest and Relaxation narrator’s obsession with sleeping through an entire year. Itself a statement on privilege. And yes, like The Palestinian Narrator, The Blonde Narrator is quick to tell their reader how they live. That is to say, how they live without having to worry about money the way that most people do.

For The Blonde Narrator, that includes not only the inheritance she got from her parents, but the rent money she collects from the Upstate house she also inherited and the unemployment money she’s managed to secure after getting fired from her job as an assistant/receptionist at an art gallery in Chelsea called Ducat. This job being from the phase in her life when she was still pretending that doing the “expected things” might lead to her “personal satisfaction,” as so many are conditioned to believe by both society and their parents. Recalling that part of herself while in hibernation, The Blonde Narrator says, “I thought that if I did normal things—held down a job, for example—I could starve off the part of me that hated everything.”

In a sense, that’s what The Palestinian Narrator is doing too, perhaps more successfully…at first. But eventually, as it is with The Blonde Narrator, she can’t pretend anymore to be something like “equipped” for her profession. Which has much higher stakes involved than being a gallery girl. Especially since, for The Palestinian Narrator, remaining clean is a full-time job in and of itself. Much as it’s a full-time job for The Blonde Narrator to pursue her compulsive need to be “renewed” by this hibernation project. Unlike The Blonde Narrator’s “fetish,” however, The Palestinian Narrator has a socially acceptable compulsion (being a “clean freak”), which she confirms by saying, “It’s a common condition, and one that isn’t socially frowned upon. On the contrary, it’s an indication of good character.” More than that, a sign of the U.S.’ (and New York’s in particular) favorite word: productivity. In fact, most people in NYC are so busy being “productive” that it seems there’s scarcely time to keep the environment as clean as The Palestinian Narrator would like. Accordingly, she laments, “In New York, people didn’t care for cleanliness. In the street, I saw dead rats, diapers, toothpicks and drug baggies. I saw bottles of mascara and tampons, proof that the women, too, were dirty. New Yorkers could walk by a splatter of diarrhea on the subway tiles, bagel and coffee in hand, and not think twice.” The Palestinian Narrator, on the other hand, is not only “thinking twice” about the filth of New York, but thinking about it all the time.

Some might, thus, assume that the act of sex is something that would be far too “messy” for a person like The Palestinian Narrator, but au contraire. As she casually mentions at one point, “I’m always ready to fuck.” Her desire to do so perhaps stemming from the Peaches philosophy of trying to fuck the pain away, or maybe just to feel something other than numb. Because, apart from sex, the only thing she can seem to feel is the coin that’s been dormant inside her making itself known. And yes, seeing as how the book is named The Coin (and even includes a coin in various states of “flippage” throughout the bottom righthand corner of the novel, allowing for a “flipbook” effect when the pages are turned rapidly), it should come as no surprise how much of a central role it plays. Constantly referred to, and likely the entity that The Palestinian Narrator keeps addressing throughout (though this is, of course, left to the reader’s own interpretation). The coin she keeps speaking of is one that she swallowed the same day her parents died. It never reappeared. This leading The Palestinian Narrator to remain convinced that it has been lodged inside her body ever since. And is only just now starting to “make itself known.”

Apart from cleanliness and dirtiness, it’s all she can seem to think about, at one point even making the analogy about a bad night’s sleep, “It felt as if I had slept on a coin, a small and dense one, like a thick shekel or an old British pound, and in my dreams, it left an imprint of the queen.” The symbolism in that last line is also a clear allusion to not only the British imperialism that has subjugated so many different people over the centuries, but to the British influence itself over the founding of Israel, de facto the displacement of Palestinians. Particularly as the decades since 1948 wore on, and now, here we are, with Palestine in ruins and Israel freely beginning supposedly “illegal” construction in the West Bank. The intent with this being, as it has always been, to “bury the idea of a Palestinian state.” And, in this regard, the coin being “buried” inside of her is linked to this notion—that Palestine (ergo, Palestinians themselves) has been forcibly buried as the years have gone on.

So maybe that’s why The Palestinian Narrator tries to distract herself with the “normalcy” of a job. This despite inheriting half of her father’s Estate, or “twenty-eight million seven hundred and fifty-five thousand U.S. dollars.” But then, part of the reason the narrator does take the job is because she wants more money in her life, for this massive sum she inherited can only be meted out, per the stipulations of the will, in very controlled monthly amounts (and of course it’s never “enough” when you’re a rich person with “a lot of overhead”). Prompting Sasha to tell her she’s “simultaneously rich and poor.” Just as she’s both a citizen and a non-citizen of the world due to being Palestinian. As for who Sasha is, well, like The Blonde Narrator, The Palestinian Narrator has only a few people in her life. Countable on her hands if one doesn’t include the more “satellite” ilk in her orbit (e.g., her students and co-workers at Franklin).

For The Blonde Narrator, there is only her loony psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, and her longtime “best friend” (though more like frenemy), Reva. And sometimes, her douchebag/finance guy ex, Trevor, if only in flashback form. The Palestinian Narrator, instead, has a douchey “boyfriend” for most of The Coin, referring to him only as “Trenchcoat” in honor of the Burberry trench coat he’s always wearing. One that he plucked from The Palestinian Narrator’s garbage after she left it on one of the cans because she felt it was too dirty to keep wearing. So it is that when she spots him wearing it out on the streets later, she can’t help but feel an odd gravitational pull to this, for all intents and purposes, hobo unabashedly wearing, quite literally, another woman’s trash. The other male presence in The Palestinian Narrator’s life is the aforementioned Sasha, who is hopelessly “obsessed” with her, but for whom the narrator has no real feelings. Granted, she does move to his neighborhood intentionally upon arriving to New York, describing the Fort Greene area (via the Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower) by asking, “Do you know the tall clock tower, the one that looks like a dick?” Yet, despite not exactly having “warm” feelings toward Sasha, she does take advantage of staying over at his place now and again when she finds her own apartment too overwhelmingly dirty. This being part of why she characterizes choosing to live with him as a matter of: “I wanted to be close to him, not in a dependent way, but the way it’s nice to live near a convenience store.”

And, talking of a “convenience store,” The Blonde Narrator is quite fond of the bodega right by her Upper East Side apartment, run by various Egyptian guys who are essentially the only people that ever see her out of hibernation (though she’s mostly “out of it” every time she goes in there as well). Apart from Reva, who keeps visiting her “best friend” despite how surly she is toward her—and despite how their friendship is mostly grounded in Reva’s envy—The Blonde Narrator’s connection to the world “around her” is basically nonexistent. But even though The Palestinian Narrator seems more deeply attached to others in and of the world, her loneliness and isolation is just as palpable. Even in remarks as “off-handed” as, “Sometimes we have to become independent of our families, not because we don’t love them but because they weigh us down.” This mirrors The Blonde Narrator’s detachment from her own no-longer-existent family, stating of holding on to her parents’ house instead of selling it, “It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”

The Palestinian Narrator’s similar detachment with regard to “family matters” is also, however, part of a seeming desire to attempt “mimicking” American culture. This being apparent when she tells one of her favorite students, “You want to hear my secret to success, Jay? I have very few belongings, I’m focused on myself, I am my own greatest asset… You don’t need anything or anyone else.” This promotion of such intense individualism is continuously championed by the U.S., a place that The Palestinian Narrator refers to in no uncertain terms as “the devil” (“America looked gloomier to me than in the pictures. There were crackheads in the streets and cokeheads in the high-rises. And there was what America had done abroad, in Vietnam, in Guatemala, and especially to my people… I mean, how could the devil be the dream?”—you know, as in “the American dream”).

The casual way in which The Palestinian Narrator peppers in her class commentary is also akin to what The Blonde Narrator does throughout My Year of Rest and Relaxation. For instance, when explaining that there’s a park located between her and Sasha’s apartments, The Palestinian Narrator adds, “It was shaped like a triangle and I had to walk around it, because there was no gate to enter, no way to cut across. I suspected because they didn’t want homeless people sleeping in there. I imagined that one day in the not-too-distant future, when there were no more poor people in the neighborhood, there would be a grand opening of the locked park.” Yet every time the reader thinks that the narrator might be conveying something like “empathy” for the “less fortunate,” the rich bitch side of herself rears its ugly head. Case in point, when talking about how her kitchen window faces Fulton Street and how she doesn’t want to walk past it naked after getting out of the shower, the narrator further elaborates, “I’m just going to say it. I didn’t want poor people to see my body. Their desperation scared me.”

So it is that both narrators fundamentally “serve” to mock rich bitches by embodying “caricatures” of the type (though not really, for rich people really do act this way) and, in so doing, illuminating something larger about class. About people who think they “care” but honestly couldn’t give a shit. At least not apart from anything beyond such “success” trappings as a Birkin bag. Though, to be fair, The Blonde Narrator does try her best to detach from this material way of life while still being entirely dependent on it. But she tries to remind herself of why she ran from it by still allowing Reva into her life (by allowing her into her apartment). Because this is a woman who serves as an avatar for everything that’s wrong, empty and so wholly unsatisfying about late-stage capitalism. Keeping up with her appearance and pop culture references but being so utterly miserable. As for The Blonde Narrator, she would rather be miserable without having to try so hard to fit in at the same time. So it is that she sinks into the comfort of “irrelevant” movies (on VHS, no less) like Fatal Beauty starring Whoopi Goldberg (who will serve as a “talisman,” of sorts, throughout the novel). To be sure, both women are fond of highlighting rather esoteric movie choices (at least by au courant standards), as The Palestinian Narrator also reveals by showing the first thirty minutes of Scent of a Woman to her class.

As for the nature of each narrator’s “project,” eventually, both pursuits end up being related to rooting into their apartments—for The Palestinian Narrator, that means literally. Creating a “green space” in her apartment filled with dirt, the very thing she tries so hard to avoid for most of The Coin, the narrator says, “The project was to create a new natural order. The idea had come to me from the nature of Upstate New York…” That idea being to re-create some semblance of the flora and fauna that existed in her homeland. As for the dirt part of it, the narrator “reasons,” “No, my apartment wasn’t dirty. Nature is clean. It’s civilization that’s dirty.” While the “insane” projects of each woman are different, they each speak to a desire to root into something, to be and feel at home. Whether in a place or even in one’s own body. And in both narrators’ situation, they each talk about wanting to be born “anew” in some way through the rigors of their projects. As The Palestinian Narrator says, “I wanted to be born again.” Perhaps as someone with a more concrete sense of identity, or even someone more easily brainwashed by the Western world rather than horrified by it.

Incidentally, in an interview for the Inklings Book Club podcast, when asked if My Year of Rest and Relaxation was an inspiration while writing The Coin, Zaher stated that it was Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. that served as her primary, let’s say, “totem.” However, she also added that “[My Year of Rest and Relaxation] is the soul sister book of my book” despite having read it after writing hers (or so she says…)

Regardless of how much more restless The Palestinian Narrator’s journey is in The Coin, one thing is for certain in both novels (though it’s The Blonde Narrator who says it): “Things were happening in New York City—they always are—but none of it affected me. This was the beauty of sleep—reality detached itself and appeared in my mind as casually as a movie or a dream. It was easy to ignore things that didn’t concern me. Subway workers went on strike. A hurricane came and went. It didn’t matter. Extraterrestrials could have invaded, locusts could have swarmed, and I would have noted it, but I wouldn’t have worried.” Such is the cocoon—the protective padding—of affluence. And apathy.