Warning: some spoilers
Counting Crows, Iranian-born Neda Aria’s latest novel, is an unflinching story of unrequited love and romantic attachment, an exciting blend of noir and fantasy that interweaves as the narrator shifts from past to present and back trying to unravel the mystery of her longing. The past in Tehran, a “prison” for women in general, is where the young narrator, Pahlavi, a rebel, gets kicked out of school, but she is also her broken family’s savior. Her father, a druggie, is never there, and when he is hauled off to prison, Pahlavi’s mother’s life unravels, even as Pahlavi tries to create a semblance of stability for her ill and erratic parent and vulnerable younger sister Taraneh.
Teenage Pahlavi is a wild, artistic spirit longing for a higher education and escape to America, her idyllic country. Money is the main obstacle keeping her back and the lack of it nearly drives her to the brink while she, her mother and sister are forced to live with a domineering grandfather in a sterile and controlling environment after Pahlavi's father's imprisonment. Finally a moment of good fortune strikes when Pahlavi’s mentor and friend Pari finds a couple willing to sponsor the aspiring artist’s trip to America and her higher education.
In the U.S., in Michigan, Pahlavi, who has changed her name to Tina, strives to fulfill her artistic ambitions, all the while full of doubts, missing her mother and sister, but not Tehran. A young man she meets in a bar, Gus, echoes her lostness and confusion, becoming a romantic escape and the tether between Tina’s lost and awakening self. Tina and Gus get drunk, go to raves, seem to connect, but their times together are spontaneous and fleeting, until they lose touch.
In the present, Tina lives in New York with her husband Henry, a solid, hard-working man, with whom she is trying to conceive, and she has found artistic success. While on the surface her life seems fulfilled, she still fantasizes about Gus, wonders where he is, her near obsession interfering with a defining, artistic project and her marriage to a practical, and caring man. Perturbed with Tina’s dark moods and unswerving dedication to her art, Henry finally convinces Tina to revisit Michigan, to take care of lingering issues, and they travel there together.
In Michigan, Tina shows Henry the bars and hot spots where she and Gus used to hang out, but finds everything changed. They are sitting outdoors at a café when Gus passes by with a woman, turns and decides to meet up with Henry and Tina and introduces Lily. The foursome spends time together and Gus and Tina do what they’d never done before, exchange numbers.
One night Gus calls and asks Tina to meet him, which she does. Reuniting this time alone, secrets leak out as they survey their past together. The narrator shifts back in memory to that night in the late 90s when after a long drunken night of teasing one another she and Gus finally had sex. Revisiting that time together in the present reignites passion and Gus returns a memento Tina left in his bed.
Counting Crows is richly emotional, full of musical references that pull at cultural and nostalgic threads of love throughout. The symbol of crows pursues the narrator in Tehran, urging her on. When Pahlavi’s (Tina’s) father is caught with a stash of opium, for example, and dragged off to prison, the narrator observes, “Crows cawed…Fucking birds. Always hanging around, waiting for something to die.”
Ultimately it’s the lingering past that has to die for the narrator, the hankering for home with her mother and sister in Tehran and the longing for a lost man in America, whose love might lead nowhere.
More than a dark, multi-cultural story about a punk kid from Iran with the guts to leave everything and venture into a new land to fulfill her artistic dreams, Counting Crows is a haunting exploration of the nature of longing and its powerful, unrelenting force in the life of a driven artist.