Behind the veil

“GIRLS of Riyadh,” a first novel by a young Saudi woman, Rajaa Alsanea, is one of those rare books with the power to shake up an entrenched society. The novel is framed as a series of e-mail postings, sent by an unnamed narrator to her online chat site, chronicling the lives of four (pseudonymous) friends -- college-age women of the Saudi upper class.

For a year, every week after Friday prayers, the narrator posts a new episode of her story online, focusing on her heroines’ romantic entanglements. As her site attracts more readers, including more and more Arab men, her fame begins to spread: Who is this person who dares to talk about the relations between the sexes with such cheeky frankness in a culture in which those matters are never openly discussed?

In September 2005, when the novel was first published (in Arabic, in Lebanon), a firestorm erupted. For months, the book was banned in the Saudi kingdom, although it circulated there in bootlegged editions; throughout the rest of the Middle East, it was widely read and discussed.

Now, “Girls of Riyadh” appears in English. Few Saudi novels have ever been published in the West, let alone one written in the form of an online confession by a smart and feisty 23-year-old woman. Moreover, this novel’s stated aim is nothing less than to expose the hypocrisy and contradictions inherent in a highly rigid society ruled by Sharia, the law derived from the Koran. For those of us who know little about day-to-day life in Saudi Arabia, “Girls of Riyadh” affords a glimpse into a hidden culture, or at least one segment of it: the world of privileged young urban women obsessed with men.

The girls of Riyadh -- Sadeem Al-Horaimli, Lamees Jeddawi, Gamrah Al-Qusmanji and Michelle Al-Abdulrahman -- are all graduates of posh private schools. Covered head to toe in public, they and their friends wear expensive designer clothes in private, get nose jobs abroad (cosmetic surgery is prohibited at home), ride around in chauffeur-driven limos (women are forbidden to drive) and eat takeout from Burger King while cruising the boulevards to check out the guys, who hold up signs bearing their cellphone numbers.

Saudi girls are not allowed to meet men in public (the religious police arrest Lamees merely for sitting at a cafe with a man who is not a relative). Their marriages are arranged, in a culture that disdains romantic love even as its appeal is continually spread by Western movies and Western music. (Valentine’s Day, the narrator reports, was outlawed in Saudi Arabia after the idea took hold with a vengeance.)

But Alsanea’s novel shows us that in its own tortured way, romantic love is alive -- if not exactly well -- in the kingdom. She peels back the veneer of propriety to show how the girls manage to conduct love affairs in secret. Cellphones and instant text-messaging make these supercharged relationships possible; at all hours of the day and night, and for hours at a time, the girls talk to their boyfriends, exchanging intimacies and endearments that take the place of face-to-face dating.

As might be expected, most of the novel’s matches are doomed to fail. Michelle falls for Faisal, who loves her in return but eventually must forsake her, because his mother forbids him to marry a girl with an American mother. Gamrah weds Rashid, who takes her to Chicago, where he’s a student; there she discovers he’s having an affair (with a “petite and slim” Japanese woman) that has been going on for years and that he expects her to tolerate. Sadeem is betrothed to Waleed; they love each other passionately, but before the wedding takes place, she surprises him one night by turning up in a black negligee and allowing him sexual favors -- after which Waleed dumps her, because who wants that kind of girl for a wife?

The girls discuss their predicaments with one another, often at the house of the wise Um Nuwayyir, a divorced woman who serves as a kind of auntie and confidant. When their hearts get broken, they can always go abroad, spending time in family apartments in London or San Francisco, where they are free to behave as Western women do. On return flights, Saudi men and women alike form long lines for the restrooms, waiting to change back into the abaya and hijab (for the women) and thobe, shimagh and eqal (for the men) so as to be presentable for landing.

Alsanea’s narrator’s voice, with its mix of high- and low-brow references (she quotes, among others, Socrates, Mark Twain, Khalil Gibran and Eleanor Roosevelt, along with a host of Arabic poets and Muslim televangelists), carries the novel forward at a brisk pace. She explains much as she goes along, even footnoting when necessary. “Our Saudi society,” she writes, “resembles a fruit cocktail of social classes in which no class mixes with another unless absolutely necessary, and then only with the help of a blender! The ‘velvet’ Riyadh upper class was, to the four girls, the whole world.... “

As compelling as “Girls of Riyadh” is as a scandal-mongering piece of cultural writing, it also, as the 21st-century version of an epistolary novel, reads like a blog between covers. The narrator occasionally incorporates her readers’ responses into the text, making it a kind of interactive work. One reader suggests she publish her weekly e-mails as a novel; the narrator declares that she’d much prefer them as grist for a TV series, because “the literature of the written word is bourgeois while the image is democratic.”

You sense that the idea of fame has begun to seduce her, including the attention she’s getting from “literary lions”: “One said I was a talented writer who belongs to the metaphysical surrealistic expressionist strain of the impressionists’ school, or something like that.... If only this big-mouth knew the truth! I don’t have the slightest idea what these words even MEAN ... ! But deserved or not, it is indeed gratifying to be the subject of such panegyric. (Hey, at least I can match their vocabulary now and then!) What do I think about impressionist metaphysical surrealism? It’s positively, absolutely PUFFSOULISTIC!”

Puffsoulistic “Girls of Riyadh” may be, but as a novel, it lacks the qualities that made, say, “The Kite Runner” or “The Swallows of Kabul” -- to name two recent novels out of the Middle East -- so moving. There’s almost no sense of the physical landscape, no nuanced consideration of moral or psychological realms, and the language is uneven at best.

And yet, however we may characterize this book, one thing is indisputable: It’s the work of a brave and intelligent young woman. Alsanea currently lives in Chicago, where she is pursuing a degree in endodontics, but she says she intends to return to Saudi Arabia. When she does, perhaps she will find that her debut novel has helped foster more openness in that society. *