The women are in their early thirties or late twenties. Both remain nameless. Their parents have died in separate car accidents. They live alone—a small apartment in Tel Aviv, a larger one bedroom in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. One has a brother who sends her money from their parents’ estate (“about twenty-eight million seven hundred and fifty-five thousand US dollars,” we’re told, without ever learning what the parents did to become millionaires). The other is an only child with a vague circle of distant friends. They have self-destructive habits: The woman in Brooklyn believes she’s dirty and performs elaborate skin-sloughing rituals that are described as painfully and painstakingly as they must be to experience. The Tel Aviv woman likes to do heroin “about once a month.”

Both have boyfriends, older, physically unattractive men who are mostly supportive; kept at arm’s length in one case (“I wanted to be close to him, not in a dependent way, but in the way it’s nice to live near a convenience store”), or emotionally distant and evasive in the other (“For long months I noticed he took care to hide something from me. At first I thought he was leading a double life; that he has a wife and possibly children somewhere ... I never demanded exclusivity from him and besides always held some respect for half truths”). Each of the women has sex with or fantasizes about sex with other men, Brooklyn woman also has sex with women, casually if not quite recreationally.

These encounters happen with an arrhythmic regularity, providing an unsteady backbeat for the novels’ episodic driftiness. Sex, drugs, and shopping happen at intervals to keep up readers’ dopamine levels, even if such encounters are only obscurely significant to the characters themselves. Less actions (or transactions) than behaviors, these are described in the same forensic tone one might use for scratching an itch or picking a scab. Readers may either recognize their own semi-unconscious, addictive, compulsive, or not quite agential tendencies, or they will be duly shocked by all this youthful acting—in the sense of pretense and also in the sense of script-following, but not in the sense of “choice”—unburdened by shudders of consequence or drama.

There are differences, too. The wealthier woman teaches eighth graders at some kind of progressive charter school serving mostly Black children in Manhattan. She is Palestinian, or Israeli Arab—the woman recognizes no distinction between the two, the whole land is occupied. An affected ignorance and cynicism about borders and roles also figures into her narrative persona: “I didn’t even know the shape of New York State. And frankly, I didn’t care. I knew by then that I was a settler, that I would take and that I would leave.” All the same, she flirts with activism of a more rooted kind, swapping out the official middle school English curriculum (improbably featuring the Brontës and Moby Dick!) for a crash course in the Black Panthers and the pedagogy of the oppressed, taking her students to hear a Newark resistance poet (“Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers to stay home that day?”), and having them practice raised fist salutes.

The other woman is an Israeli writer who may have been a prostitute in Tel Aviv, or might only have been the author of a successful first novel about prostitutes in Tel Aviv written in the collective first person, somewhat akin to Jeffrey Eugenides’ Virgin Suicides. This blurring feels more dutifully postmodern, more conceptual, than her Palestinian counterpart’s vagueness. To represent is “always already” (as Martin Heidegger, the most important Israeli philosopher of the 20th century, might say) a misrepresentation. I is not I, I is not me; there are no identities, only mistaken identities, confusions, and projections.

Throughout Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin and Mayaan Eitan’s The Scream, the women are concerned that something not entirely wanted or welcomed has lodged inside their bodies, fatefully influencing the course of their lives. In the Israeli woman’s case, this is a growing fetus. For the Palestinian woman, it’s a coin, an Israeli shekel the narrator believes she swallowed as a little girl on a car trip with her family, the fateful one, preceding the accident. Never properly excreted, the coin instead manifests in the center of her back, the one exact spot on her body she cannot figure out how to scrub—a cause or only another symptom of her skin-sloughing mania.

The dramatic tension in each novel derives from the resolution of these internal and internalized figures, both literalized metaphors and MacGuffins. How and in what form will the narrators rid themselves of these troubling others, or will they integrate them, adapt or accommodate themselves to them? Do boundaries hold, and if they do, do they integrate—or repel? In different ways, each figure speaks in oblique and whispered voices to larger concerns central to Israeli and Palestinian societies; yet the subject of the novels are almost wholly marginal to the political preoccupations of those societies’ so called “stakeholders,” not to mention their leaders and power brokers.

What happens when a liberated, autonomous, highly ambivalent Israeli woman in Tel Aviv gets knocked up? Will she accept the “bio-political” fate being prepared for her? And what about her boyfriend—an equally ambivalent Israeli man known only in English as X, whose interests are sex and Hebrew literature? Is this quiet, often competent “good enough boyfriend” really a patriarchal figure worthy of Abraham and Yitzhak (Rabin)? Might he transform into one?

The coin metaphor poses less direct but more unsettling questions of the wealthy, cosmopolitan Palestinian woman: Is she haunted by shame, by her wealth, by the literal stamp of Israel in the form of currency, by an enduring and unshakable feeling of loss that is sometimes physical but mainly existential? Yes there was Grandma’s garden near Haifa, the memory of which looms ever larger as the novel advances. But this longing brings out the theological side of the Palestinian wish for return more than it evokes any will to concrete political action. So what, after all, is driving this woman crazy? There is no Islam here, neither in ethico-religious nor political form, just as there is no Judaism in The Scream. There are only these two women, one living reluctantly in the land, the other always living with the land in her head.

The precursors to these novels of women adrift are recent, but also stretch back to the late 1960s and early 1970s: Affectless anomie amid wealth and declining mental health defined Joan Didion’s lone novel, Play It as It Lays; the identity drama harks back to de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, (a mistranslation of La Femme Rompue that incidentally nourished a particular strain of victim ideology in American feminism). More recent avatars of the genre include Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014-18) and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2015), which is about what happens when a disaffected, wealthy, young blond American woman decides to put herself to sleep for a year as a kind of therapy-cum-conceptual-art project, but wakes up in time for 9/11.

Even though it was more of a throwback, Moshfegh’s novel was hyped as “hypercontemporary” by the sort of magazine book critics whose ignorance of literary history serves them as a job qualification, and then went on to spawn a thousand imitators in MFA programs and Lower East Side lit magazines. Whatever its originality, My Year of Rest and Relaxation provides a pattern for these more recent novels that work as both an anatomy of anomie and allegory of emotional and political detachment, a helplessness verging on despair.

The main thing in the revival of this genre of not-quite-feminist novel is the flat voice: People everywhere are disaffected and medicated. If you’re not disaffected or medicated, you don’t get it. You don’t maybe have that despair in your heart that only comes from feeling too much—too much too quickly, too much of everything, the kind of feelings that will make you take drugs to make them go away or spend a small fortune on Korean skin care products while knowing it’s wrong to do so (“Two thousand more years of snail cream and you will see a woman’s brain through her face,” says The Coin’s narrator, while applying premium quality snail mucus).

If you’re not here for the cultural contradictions of late capitalism, these novels are not for you. Zaher’s narrator mines a particularly rich vein of contempt for squares, white people, men, Palestinian Americans who speak bad Arabic, pretty much everyone, with the marked exception of the narrator’s students. The contempt might be in character, but it is much more “in genre.” These are exercises in style or stylishness, or style confused with stylishness: A major diversion in The Coin involves the protagonist in a plot with a queer, dandy drifter to obtain and resell valuable Hermes Birkin bags.

The Scream is more propulsive and minimalist by design, the writing exact, not just world-creating but also world-excluding:

The scream lasts longer than the time it takes for him to ejaculate, and is quite uniform—a single monotonous note emitted from his mouth into the air. It appears at that moment that he forgets I exist underneath him and forgets the outside world exists too; the neighbors next door, the entrance gate which squeaks every time tenants come and go, the winter wind rustling the few remaining leaves on the trees, even his own body producing the long scream—he’s entirely oblivious to that.

The boyfriend screams when he comes, and so too does the novel. Still, Eitan is not immune from touches of fashion-signaling. In a novel this sparing of detail, is it truly important the reader knows that the narrator snorts her heroin off a copy of Flaubert’s Le Légende de St. Julien L’Hospitalier, in French? I mean, yeah, if you happen to know that the story is about a form of radical hosting that might be as close as men come to getting pregnant, but otherwise it’s just there for atmospherics, the literary equivalent of a Birkin.

Both The Coin and The Scream—along with de Beauvoir, Didion, Cusk, and Moshfegh before them—are women’s versions of what Iris Murdoch classified in 1970 as “existentialist novels.” Existentialist novels, Murdoch observed, were what emerged when humans were shorn of attachments to society, family, traditions, belief in God, or beliefs in a national and political purpose, and were thrown back instead upon only their own wills, their bodies, and their selves (more cynical subsequent generations would note that even the self doesn’t exist except as a brand identity). “The voluntarist or existentialist novel,” Murdoch writes, “is the document of this anxious modern consciousness. The story of the lonely, brave man, defiant without optimism, proud without pretension, always an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of society.” The gendering here is deliberate, as Murdoch was taking her examples primarily from Camus, Sartre, and the early Saul Bellow of Dangling Man and The Victim, as well as Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, in a more comic register. Murdoch tended to reserve her second category of 20th-century novel, The Mystical, for women, and in her own novels she would often pair male existentialists and female mystics, occasionally mixing them up for variety.

The purpose of Murdoch’s exercise in taxonomies was not to demarcate hard and fast boundaries or enforce gender stereotypes but rather to notice tendencies. The passive consumption and self-harm of the female existentialist novel’s protagonists mirror the random acts of other-directed violence found in male existentialist novels in the mode of Richard Wright’s Native Son or Camus’ The Stranger. Although we are generations removed from Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” and the legal defense that “society made me do it,” the style and emotions associated with these attitudes reverberate.

How else can a sympathetic reader feel about the protagonists of The Coin and The Scream except that the existence of these damaged, heartbroken, artful, witty, and desperate women unfolding on the page is indeed intended at some level to perform a deep, if largely unspoken, criticism of each of their societies? And yet there are notable exceptions in each case that dissipate the novels’ critical energies and return them to a comfortable, safe space of lifestyle and attitude.

Wherever one happens to align on the question of Palestinian statehood, the existence of a Palestinian society is undeniable. Yet for all the forces arrayed against the potential flourishing of The Coin’s unnamed narrator, Palestinian society itself hardly appears as a source. Recognized during a scene at a fundraising banquet for Palestinian causes, the narrator denies she is her mother’s daughter. But this scene is played as a symptom of her perversity and shame, a fervent and Westernized wish for unbelonging. The second pass is given to the pedagogy of the oppressed that the narrator uses with her students.

The Coin actually contains the seeds of a very interesting novel overwatered by a conceptualist, egotistical one, a kind of Palestinian Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in which a Palestinian teacher of Black American boys (and one, lonely, alienated Chinese kid, an inversion of the model minority stereotype) hands down to them her passions and obsessions, along with her anger and her thwarted, antisocial rebelliousness. The kids take this so much to heart that they steal her wallet, burn down the school (or at least a floor of it), and get themselves expelled. Zaher handles this material as a subplot to the narrator’s self-regarding madness, but the novel would have been richer had it been less “existentialist” and more tightly focused on how the narrator’s beliefs—especially about the origins of her particular Palestinian refugee problem—collide with and create havoc among others around her. This could only have worked if the author understood The Coin more as a social novel than a late capitalist existentialist one.

Eitan’s novel similarly works as a bleak portrait of contemporary Israel, but participates in a rhetorical tendency increasingly common to both Israeli right and left, which we could call “leave me alone-ism.” All anyone wants in Israel is to be left alone: by the Palestinians, by Iran, by the Americans, by goyim, by the Haredim, by the Supreme Court or by the Knesset, and ultimately by each other. The Scream is a criticism of loneliness written from this place of loneliness that doesn’t know how to do anything except repeat a desire to be left alone and brings that desire to consummation in the novel’s final act.

I have so far neglected to mention one more salient difference between these novels. The Coin was written in English and published in July by the independent press Catapult; The Scream was written in Hebrew, translated into English by Daniel Behar. It is the follow-up to Eitan’s début novel Love, published with corporate publisher Penguin in 2022. As of this date, The Scream has not found an American or U.K. publisher. The reasons for this have to do with long-term downturns in publishing, especially with works in translation, and the skewing of incentives in corporate publishing toward an inexhaustible supply of first novels. An endless series of débuts makes second acts that much harder to pull off or find publishers, even those by promising writers, like Eitan, who have won awards.

Neither is Eitan helped by the increasingly uncomfortable situation of Hebrew literature prior even to Oct. 7, a result of mushrooming, elite, feminist anti-Zionism within the female-dominant publishing universe (Sally Rooney joining her brand to BDS in 2022 is but one instance). Eitan is writing what’s classified as contemporary literary women’s fiction: that is, writing by women that is not intended for mass readership, if such a readership can even be said to exist in our era of subcultures and niches. These literary novels by women are instead intended to circulate within a fenced-in prestige economy. In this economy, publishers act less often as tastemakers than gatekeepers to foundation grants, writer colonies, awards committees, and teaching jobs that provide authors with more than the recognition that all writers crave but also the financial support all writers need.

Most writers now live from this new patronage system. The institutions, magazines, and foundations, along with most of what remains of publishing, have gone all in on cosmetic solutions to social justice problems, and so their purposes have become extraliterary or even nonliterary. Writers now compete in a system that combines the worst features of market capitalism with religious or political ideological state publishing apparatuses.

Spare a thought, too, for the few remaining maverick editors. They are increasingly subject to the tyranny of their marketing departments, urged to outsource their own literary judgment of a work to considerations of “relatability,” “sensitivity,” and alignment with assumptions about everything from the sexual politics of the workplace to the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

Although we are now a half-century into a postmodern moment that deemed everything to be political, especially the personal, certain age old double standards apparently persist when it comes to judging the political content (and commercial viability) of novels from certain parts of the world. No one asks Sally Rooney to denounce Irish money laundering and real estate fraud. On the other hand, a darkly feminist, or at least woman-centered, noir novel about a Jewish woman’s unplanned pregnancy in Israel that entirely avoids the question of Zionism and the question of Palestine and also refuses to say whether Bibi Netanyahu is a bad man or only the worst prime minister in history is—for such people—a problem.

If you were an editor at a publishing house, either indie or mainstream corporate fake-lefty, and if your marketing department tells you that your audience is now likely to be drawn almost entirely from younger, college educated white women, ask yourself whether you would take a chance on such an apparently apolitical Israeli novel especially if your job might depend on its success. And that is why you won’t find Eitan’s novel in your local bookstore.

In a richer novelistic world than can be found either in The Coin’s contempt-laced despair or The Scream’s horror vacui—even at the risk—God forbid—of sentimentality—something might happen that could bring these two moving and powerful women’s voices into the same orbit. That world would also be a better place than our world of cultural vigilante leftism from corporate institutions: In this utopia, both novels would be available to English-language readers. The novelists might one day find themselves on a panel together at PEN World Voices; they might become friends, or share needles.