Liquid

January 6, 2025
Rahmani puts a satirical spin on the rom-com with her incisive if predictable debut novel. In 2019 Los Angeles, the unnamed narrator, a queer daughter of immigrants from Iran and India, is two years out of graduate school, struggling to land a tenure-track job in the humanities, and striking out at romance. Still, a friend tells her that she’s “better off than the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel,” thanks to her independence. The narrator decides to take a social science approach to dating: she’ll go on 100 first dates over the course of the summer and take copious notes, with the goal of securing a marriage proposal. What follows is a whirlwind homage to the classic “ridiculous first date” trope: a man takes the narrator to his parents’ house, a woman needs a green card, a married man fails to tell her about his open marriage, and so on. The novel abruptly shifts tone after the narrator learns her father has had a heart attack, prompting her to visit him in Tehran. 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. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic.

February 1, 2025
"The course of true love never did run smooth" according to Shakespeare, and that proves to be the case in this contemporary tale of looking for love in all the wrong places. Rahmani's unnamed narrator is a young, queer Muslim woman struggling to cling to the lowest rungs of the academic ladder in Los Angeles two years after she's earned a Ph.D. in literature. Her thesis examined how the "companionate" model of modern marriage replaced older "contract" arrangements where goods and services (children, money, protection) were exchanged, not affectionate feelings. When she fails to publish her thesis as a book and succeed in the ranks of adjunct appointments, the narrator feels the looming prospect of yet another disappointment: her parents' perception of her as an "old maid" and the resulting marriage setup her Indian and Iranian immigrant parents will surely attempt. During a dinner liberally lubricated by wine, an old college friend suggests the solution: "Just marry rich." Rahmani's sardonic narrator approaches this project--motivated by economic and other desperations--by opening an Excel spreadsheet, creating an online dating profile, and setting a deadline for going on 100 dates and securing an engagement by the beginning of the fall semester. Thus begins an odyssey of bad dates with a variety of Los Angelenos--male and female--who are themselves looking for love, a hookup, or some company. The story takes a more contemplative tone as the setting switches to Tehran, where Rahmani's security-seeker and her mother have traveled to attend to her estranged father's serious illness. Time away from the spreadsheet and in a family setting provides some clarity for an intriguing main character. A thoroughly modern combination of snark and sincerity on the road to love.

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February 1, 2025
It began when her bff Adam made the offhand comment, "Just marry rich," during a very expensive dinner meant to celebrate his eighth anniversary with his (repeatedly) cheating partner Julia. Two years after getting her PhD, the unnamed narrator remains professionally and personally unmoored. Armed with Excel, she sets a challenging goal: 100 dates with people of all genders, 14 weeks, an engagement by the beginning of fall term. After downloading two Adam-recommended apps (for dating, for hooking up), she "read and analyzed and judged and discerned and hearted and passed." Her spreadsheet fills quickly: a green card-seeking model/actress; a health-care consultant who "didn't know Whitney Houston was Black;" a dog psychic to the stars; a slumlord writing terrible poetry. Until her mother--their requisite weekly calls average 92 seconds--reports her father is hospitalized in Tehran after a heart attack. Their fraught reunion will reset all plans. For all its erudite vocabulary and highlighter-worthy phrasing, this tale is not quite convincing as an amalgam of snide rom-com and dysfunctional family drama, but professor and translator Rahmani's debut novel is a sharply observed, cleverly composed examination of modern love.

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Starred review from February 14, 2025

DEBUT Like Zadie Smith's On Beauty, Rahmani's novel adapts and employs esoteric academic theoretical concepts in a story that explores the margins of sexuality, gender, racial identity, and much more. It follows an Iranian and Indian American scholar's decision to marry rich (with a quipping reference to that oft-repeated opening line of Pride and Prejudice) by setting an assignment for herself to go on 100 dates by August 17. The story that unfolds has lines pulled from Edward Said and other literary and cultural theorists, which the narrator--through words and actions--tears apart, only to reintegrate into her own narrative of belonging and becoming. Rahmani's novel is a direct and well-crafted satire of academia, but it touches on themes of power and hierarchy that can also be translated into other professions, making it a perfect read for people looking for (and at) romance with a complex sense of intersectionality and a recognition of what the narrator's mother (also an academic) describes as the semiotics of who we are. VERDICT Heady and intellectual yet sexy and deeply felt in its explorations of loss, identity, and relationships, this is fiction that brings theory into practice in a romantic comedy of sorts that will leave readers thinking about much more than Jane Austen's truth universal.--Emily Bowles

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