“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........

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