Nahid Rachlin, Novelist Who Explored the Iranian Psyche, Dies at 85

Nahid Rachlin, an Iranian-born writer who defied her parents’ expectations of an arranged marriage, instead winning a scholarship to study in the United States in the 1950s and becoming one of the first Iranians to write a novel in English, died on April 30 in Manhattan. She was 85.

Her daughter, Leila Rachlin, said the cause of her death, in a hospital, was a stroke.

Ms. Rachlin’s debut novel, “Foreigner,” published to critical acclaim the year before the Iranian revolution of 1979, depicts the slow transformation of a 32-year-old Iranian biologist named Feri from a woman living a comfortable but unsatisfying suburban life with her American husband to an ill-at-ease visitor in Iran to an indistinguishable local after she abandons her job and her spouse and resigns herself to wearing the veil.

“There is a subtle shift in ‘Foreigner’ that is fascinating to watch,” Anne Tyler, who won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, wrote in a review for The New York Times in 1979, “a nearly imperceptible alteration of vision as Feri begins to lose her westernized viewpoint.”

“What is apparent to Feri at the start — the misery and backwardness of Iranian life — becomes less apparent,” Ms. Tyler continued. “Is it that America is stable, orderly, peaceful, while Iran is turbulent and irrational? Or is it that America is merely sterile while Iran is passionate and openhearted?”

The critic Albert Joseph Guerard called “Foreigner” “as spare as Camus’s ‘The Stranger’ and with some of its enigmatic force.”