The Cheapness of Luxury

In 1899, the American economist Thorstein Veblen theorized that consuming the right kinds of goods operated as a signal of social standing for members of the upper class. That’s still true today, but some items are so elite that one needs more than money to buy them. Such products speak even more loudly, more conspicuously, than their more available counterparts. Luxury brands such as Hermès, Patek Philippe, Ferrari, and Louis Vuitton, for instance, use vetting processes to ensure that their most desirable products are sold in small numbers. These brands curate exclusivity, making it clear that there are some things that money (or at least money alone) can’t buy.

This cliché rings true for the unnamed narrator of Yasmin Zaher’s debut novel, The Coin : She is broke, at least for a wealthy woman, but her impeccable taste buys her enough social clout to get by. (Her parents died in a car accident when she was a child, leaving her with a large inheritance, but she can access her money only through a monthly allowance.) She has just moved to New York City from Palestine and has taken a job teaching English at a middle school for boys. At first, the job is mostly an accessory, secondary to the effort the narrator makes to maintain a curated appearance. Zaher lists the articles of expensive clothing that make up her small but tasteful wardrobe: “cotton oversize pants from Marni, faille pants from Chloé, two identical pairs of wide-leg raw denim from Gucci, wool pants from Miu Miu, silk pants from Bottega Veneta.” She is meticulously clean, wears Lys Méditerranée by the luxury perfumer Edouard Fléchier, and carries an Hermès Birkin bag, which she inherited from her mother.

[ Read: A better way of buying—and wanting—things ]

In America, the narrator notices that her Birkin is turning heads. It’s not just that it’s a beautiful, well-made luxury handbag; it’s that Birkins aren’t available to just anyone, so carrying one signals belonging to a particular class. “I came from a place where a bag could never have power, where only violence spoke,” the narrator notes. “And suddenly I had something that others wanted to possess, I was a woman who others wanted to embody.” She realizes that luxury is its own language, and that she speaks it fluently without even trying—a skill she’ll eventually use, in morally questionable ways, to her advantage. If belonging and privilege can be signaled by the right products, the narrator of The Coin offers a vision of just how flimsy and dirty—how cheap—that exclusivity can be.

Ever since the narrator was young, money has been at the center of her world. On the day of her parents’ death, she mysteriously swallowed a coin that she never recovered. One morning, in the present day, the narrator wakes up with a stiff neck: “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.” She worries that the coin she swallowed all those years ago has become lodged between her shoulder blades, in the one spot on her back she can’t reach. The narrator starts an intensive daily cleaning regimen that begins with a thorough scouring of her apartment and morphs into hours of personal hygiene in the bath. But the feeling of the coin—and the thought that it could be rusting inside her—persists, driving her to a breaking point; she becomes obsessed with keeping a “tight grip on the universe, and especially the dirt.”

The chaos of the narrator’s mind begins to manifest everywhere. Exhausted from spending her nights obsessively cleaning, she abandons the school curriculum in favor of experimental, improvisational classes. At one point, she invites a friend, a grifter whom she refers to as Trenchcoat, to speak to the boys about fashion. (She tells the administration that he is a guest lecturer from the nonexistent New York Refugee Action Committee.) The narrator believes that her students can learn from Trenchcoat, who is a master of appearing like he belongs in elite spaces. “You know,” the narrator tells her students, “a six can easily become an eight with the right manners and clothing, it’s not the same for women, you’re lucky to be men.” She’s joking, but as with all her humor, there is a serious, even idealistic, bent to her quip. Her students are Black and immigrant boys, and she hopes to teach them something that might help them survive in the real world. She sees herself not as a “savior” of her students, she tells the reader, but as their “general.”

The narrator’s deceptions evolve from harmless and funny—she tells a student that her brother is the most important graffiti artist in Palestine, then shows him photos of Banksy’s art—to slightly more nefarious as she and Trenchcoat become enmeshed in a Birkin-bag scheme in Paris while she’s on winter break. The two of them buy the bags and sell them at a premium to a middleman, Ivan, who then sells the bags to “whichever person had plenty of money but no class.” Because the narrator is beautiful, chic, and already carrying a Birkin, she has a greater chance of being offered the chance to buy another one. “The whole model was based on rejection, people want to belong to a club that doesn’t accept them,” she observes. But the more the narrator immerses herself in Paris’s luxury world, the more she begins to see the promise of belonging to be a facade. “Maybe pretense is all there was,” she thinks. “Fashion is pretense, education is pretense, personality, too, is a form of internalized pretense. I wondered what my true essence would be, if I were solitary, in nature, untamed and unconditioned.”

[ Read: What to read to understand how people get tricked ]

After the narrator returns from Paris, her obsession with cleanliness morphs into a manic desire to immerse herself in the outdoors, in something uncorrupted and whole. “Nature is clean,” she insists. “It’s civilization that’s dirty.” Following a trip to upstate New York that her boyfriend takes her on because she asked him for “more nature, less money,” the narrator realizes that she wants to return to her “biblical homeland,” which she sees as uncontaminated by commercialism. Life in the city, meanwhile, is irrevocably tainted by the drive for profit.

Late in the novel, at a benefit gala for Palestine, the narrator spends the evening using her boyfriend’s phone to donate thousands of dollars to the foundation that is hosting the event. “I thought that if he wanted to be close to me, the least he could do was contribute to my people’s liberation,” she remarks. When a woman at the table seems to recognize her—she knew her mother at university—she lies, dodging the interaction by ducking under the table to retrieve her dropped knife. Over and over, the narrator’s minor deceptions brush up against her assertion that she is a “moral woman.” This tension runs through the novel: The narrator knows that moving about in rarefied circles requires buying into their pretense. But each of her “moral” deeds—the gala donation, trying to teach kids how to get by in an unfair world—involves an element of duplicity.

Zaher seems to be saying that in a society as unjust as this one, even acts of morality are tarnished with grime. As with the coin lodged in the narrator’s back—a smart metaphor for inherited trauma and the currency of power—no matter how hard you scrub, you can never get clean. “Matter is constant,” she reminds the reader; some things will never decay. After all, as the narrator notes early in the novel, “every year, regardless of poverty, war, or famine, the price of the Birkin bag increases.” If the narrator is resigned to that bleak reality, who are we to disagree?