an academic goes on 100 dates to find a rich spouse

“The night I was awarded my doctorate, I had sex with a stranger on the beach.” So opens Mariam Rahmani’s debut novel, Liquid – a provocative and irreverent appraisal of academia, marriage and the structures of power.

At once a rom-com and a literary novel (threaded with theory), Liquid seems, at times, to echo Rahmani’s own experiences – though she’s said her protagonist is “not me”. Her novel erodes the boundaries between genre and literary critique.

Review: Liquid – Mariam Rahmani (Doubleday)

The unnamed protagonist is a 31-year-old adjunct exhausted by the precarity of academic labour: “few abuses are more premeditated than a PhD.” She inhabits the neoliberal university and academic job market as both insider and outsider – a “scholarship kid” without familial wealth; a casualised teacher paid only during the semester. She muses:

A lowly adjunct, I haunted the library, trying and failing to turn my dissertation into a book, trying and failing to land a real job.

Rahmini, like her protagonist, is a literary academic (at Bennington College in the United States) and a translator. In Liquid, she exposes the structural violence of 21st-century universities, which are increasingly organised and run in a way that disregards the security and livelihoods of those who work and study there.

Romantic comedy is seemingly an unlikely genre for critiquing institutional power. That is, until you realise the structures of both the university and modern relationships, including marriage, are equally absurd – to the narrator, at least.

Rebellious to her core

The narrator’s father, who lives in Iran, is Shia Muslim; her mother is a Sunni Indian American, living elsewhere in the US. Both parents think she is too old and are hinting at an arranged marriage.

Rebellious to her core, she recalls spending her “teens and early 20s in hijab as a fuck you to post-9/11 America”. She decides to embark on 100 dates to find herself a rich spouse. She’s bisexual, so any gender will do: her goal is wealth – and specifically, an end to precarious living.

Differing cultural and generational understandings of marriage are threaded throughout. Regardless, the narrator’s cynicism about the institution is clear:

In both the West and the Islamic world, you traded goods, not feelings. Women offered sex and offspring, men food and shelter.

During her 100 dates, her father’s illness draws her back to Tehran, where the possibility of a different type of relationship – and better housing prospects – hovers on the margins. Despite her father’s condition, the city itself offers solace.

Tehran was almost at the same latitude as Los Angeles. The same sun slapped against my skin.

These familial and cultural dynamics sharpen the novel’s exploration of otherness. They force the narrator to explore what it means to move between worlds, and to live at once within and outside structures of belonging.

Bravado and irony

Liquid is, in one sense, a generic rom-com, referencing recognisable classics like When Harry Met Sally, Four Weddings and a Funeral and all things Nora Ephron.

Rahmani invites readers to consider how prepackaged romantic tropes function in relation to heavier topics, including the bonds of family, diaspora and death. “I found myself reciting my long-held prejudice against the friends-to-lovers plot,” her protagonist tells us, “which I considered the most unimaginative of all the rom-com subgenres.”