‘If You Could Be Mine’ is a young adult’s novel, focussing on a lesbian affair between two girls in Iran. Written by Iranian-American author Sara Farizan, an MFA creative writing graduate from Lesley 2010, it holds a sparse tone to its prose. Short and simple with a lack of adjectives, you get the impression that Farizan has written the book specifically for what she imagines to be the shorter concentration spans of the Twitter generation.
The main protagonist is bookish and manly Sahar, seventeen, who holds a passionate but relatively inexplicable lust for same-aged Nasrin. Nasrin comes across as an unlikable character. She’s vain and selfish and narcissistic, which are not subtextual readings but character traits explicitly repeated in the writing. To the extent that for the reader, the main plot pivot of Sahar being desperately in love with Nasrin, is often thrown into dubious quandary.
If it’s supposed to be a ‘love is blind’ motif, where Sahar cannot see that Nasrin lacks any redeeming qualities whatsoever, then this invalidates the entire doomed but true love story that the novel rests itself upon.
Other characters are more interesting, particularly the cousin of Ali and the transsexual Parveen. However, mostly the portrayal of gay men is quite flippant and often verges on the judgemental. Whereas Sahar’s obsessive Sapphic passion is painted as heroic and just, gay men exist in a vacuous bubble of drugs, drinking and gum-chewing pickups.
The novel is eminently readable, it’s a quick and breeze-like book, and it’s engaging. But the trouble is it feels a little too much like a creative writing construction, rather than an artistic endeavour that captures the truth of life. Often I was wondering whether Farizan was building up the fences she had been taught to place around her imagination, rather than really letting the characters free to grow and become gripping, rich figures.
I read an article on Vice the other day which had an interesting point: when they made online content, everybody told them to make short, funny clips. But when they floated their canon, what were far more popular amongst the Millennial audience they courted were their full-length, in depth documentaries. Perhaps If You Could Be Mine is literature written for the Twitter generation, but one wonders if it’s literature that the Twitter generation wants.
• www.amazon.co.uk/If-You-Could-Be-Mine/dp/1616202513/
