[In the following excerpt, Rubin complains of the lack of plot in Rabinyan's Persian Brides, and asserts that Rabinyan's focus is on colorful descriptions instead of the narrative.]

… Only the adolescent girls featured by Israeli journalist, playwright, and poet Dorit Rabinyan in her first novel, Persian Brides, are firmly rooted in their ancestral culture. And judging from Rabinyan's vivid evocation of their fetid, cloyingly closed-in lives in the Jewish quarter of a Persian village in the early years of this century, one would have to conclude that migration is good for the soul….

A sense of vividness, a kind of larger-than-life hyperreality, may quite possibly have been what Dorit Rabinyan was aiming at in her novel, Persian Brides. Rabinyan transports us to a household in the Jewish section of a small village in Persia early in this century, and a rather peculiar household at that.

Miriam Hanoum's neighbors all consider her the worst and laziest housekeeper in the entire village. But she is also a great beauty, because she avoids scrubbing, cooking, cleaning, and all the tasks that roughen one's skin and dishevel one's appearance, and concentrates instead on covering herself and her daughters in costly oils and cosmetics. This paradox is the most amusing thing in the novel.

In her quest for vividness, Rabinyan stuffs her novel with pungent, graphic images: shrieks, wails, cackings, and an endless parade of what seems like every bodily fluid or function imaginable. Indeed, the story seems to be little more than an excuse for all these colorful, noisy, odoriferous descriptions. There is very little in the way of a plot, and the narrative keeps circling back over the same events.

Outlandishness is heaped upon outlandishness: Miriam permanently stows her mother-in-law in a basket. Miriam's spoiled daughter, Flora, maintains her fleshy figure by gobbling down mountains of food, even while her heart aches with longing for the man she recently married, a shifty peddler who has impregnated her and disappeared.

The characters and their creator seem to revel in the squalor. So did the critics whose raves are quoted in the blurbs, which just might be a phenomenon even more bizarre than anything depicted in this book.