LIQUID: A Love Story, by Mariam Rahmani
PARADISE LOGIC, by Sophie Kemp
The unnamed narrator of Mariam Rahmani’s “Liquid” — a wry, mercurial book about the horrors of being “on the market,” both in romance and in academe — is an Iranian-Indian American scholar whose work, which critiques the concept of companionate marriage, is the center of her life. Her unique position behind love’s proscenium has chipped away at her. When the story begins, she’s broke, single, toiling in Los Angeles as a “lowly adjunct” despite having finished a six-year Ph.D. program two years prior and yearning to “coast” for a while.
The acquisition of not necessarily a partner but a patron, the narrator decides, might allow her some needed space to read and write in peace. So, as the summer descends, she challenges herself to go out on 100 dates in hopes of locking down someone with money before the fall. Thus begins an exhausting, antic season of searching. After each date, the narrator fills out a spreadsheet with details of her fallow prospects’ personal finances and personality quirks. (“Bryan: Some kind of junta money. Risk of extradition.” “Rory: Health care consultant. Didn’t know Whitney Houston was Black.”)
The dating scene isn’t the only thing that’s bleak. Her best friend, Adam, bombards her with miseries every time his hot girlfriend cheats on him; her father, who lives in Tehran, wants to set her up with a cousin; her mother, a brilliant scholar and a member of one of the many university hiring committees that won’t employ our narrator, keeps calling with notes as to how her application dossier might be improved or with suggestions that she “assess the going age for old-maid status these days.”
Eleven dates shy of her goal, the narrator’s life is upended: She gets word that her father has had a heart attack, so she leaves behind her scheme to go be with him in Tehran before he dies. There, by his bedside, her glib ethos of attachment gives way to something more tender. In the midst of her father’s illness, she begins an affair with his neighbor, an older artist named Leili. Later, she takes on a new creative project translating both the Quran and the work of the poet Forugh Farrokhzad.
When it seemed briefly like the narrator might choose to stay on in Tehran indefinitely, living in her father’s house — yanking herself from the matrices of both the American university system and the marriage industrial complex, and rendering all her previous striving moot — I was alight. What possibility there is in refusal. The narrator’s dilemma — whether to stay on this unorthodox road or return to the path of convention — reflects the novel’s metafictional anxieties about which tropes of the “love story” it ought to take on, and which it ought to reject.
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. Rahmani leans away from spotlighting the terrifying possibility that, in the words of Farrokhzad herself, “one can always be a zero,/yielding nothing, whether added, subtracted, or multiplied.”
Despite bearing a “long-held prejudice against the friends-to-lovers plot,” a mainstay of her research, our narrator shrugs when she finds she’s more or less living inside one. Love proves itself a kind of kudzu here, strangling everything.
While “Liquid” dutifully fills the shape of the form it’s critiquing, Sophie Kemp’s Dada picaresque “Paradise Logic” dissolves form at the molecular level and builds an extraordinary story out of the residual goop.
This novel of love’s humiliations follows a young woman on a quest “to be the greatest girlfriend of all time” — a quest cosmically predetermined “from the moment she was bornth.”
“To be the greatest girlfriend of all time,” however, “you have to be able to tell a story.” Through tiers of narration and meta-narration stacked tremblingly ever skyward, “Paradise Logic” reveals itself to be the tale a woman tells herself, about herself, in order to justify the debasements she suffers in pursuit of companionship.
Reality Kahn, a zillennial ex-cashier with “a low quantitative I.Q.” turned New York’s leading water park commercial actress, bops around the Gowanus of our nowadays in a Tasmanian devil T-shirt seeking adventure. At a scary scary scary D.I.Y. venue called Paradise, she meets Ariel Koffman, a talented scholar of ancient Mesopotamia who loves “smoking crack before doing his homework.” Reality’s heart is pure and ready: She makes Ariel her boyfriend.
Between daily trips to a nearby bodega for “a head of iceberg lettuce” to snack on and bouts of “cracked-out sex” with Ariel, Reality “bravely works for the affection and undying love” of the man with whom she now shares a bedroom made from a shipping container. To become a more perfect girlfriend, she consults Girlfriend Weekly (a women’s periodical etched upon ancient stone tablets “bathed in a soft yellow light”) and she joins human trials for ZZZZvx Ultra (XR) (an experimental wonder drug that promises to make her “the girlfriend of his dreams”).
Ariel is unfaithful anyway. Poor Reality flees to Mount Nothing, a kind of Elysium for perfect girlfriends, where she shaves her head and assumes the name Girlfriend. But after failing a Kafkaesque trial of perfect-girlfriend character and being chased off the mountain, she enters a Mosaic period of desert wanderings until “a rare periwinkle garden snake wearing sunglasses” shows her the way home — first, though, she must pull a sword from a stone.
Unbearable tragedy lurks in these pages: rape, addiction, dissociation, generational memory of the pogroms and of the Holocaust, all chopped to pieces and stuffed between winningly insane layers of syntactical bizzaria and presentational devices galore. Refractions of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos,” Cosmopolitan magazine, Kemp’s own zines, the Torah, “Madoka Magica,” “The Divine Comedy,” Arthurian legend, Miltonian verse and more are all gloriously present. Illustrations and emoticons abound; phrases repeat themselves; characters morph into and out of one another. I have heretofore described about one-sixteenth of what’s happening.
“YOLO” is the last phrase to appear on the last page of this book — and lo, you doth only live the very once. You might as well write like it. This book swings big. The ball arcs toward Gehenna, and Kemp’s hyper narrator Naruto-runs off the page, trying kawaiily to get under it. Here, at last, is someone doing something new.
LIQUID: A Love Story | By Mariam Rahmani | Algonquin | 306 pp. | $29
PARADISE LOGIC | By Sophie Kemp | Simon & Schuster | 240 pp. | $27.99
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