A very interesting review of “In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs” in yesterday’s New York Times. Here’s the opener:

IN the prosperous northern Tehran suburb of Elahiyeh, ladies who lunch visit a French-trained psychologist downtown (to talk of their adulteries, no doubt), while their teenage daughters (”matchsticks marinated in Chanel,” in Christopher de Bellaigue’s pungent words) get nose jobs, hang around the pizza parlor and perform oral sex on their boyfriends so they’ll still technically be virgins when married off to their first cousins. Occasionally the ”morals police” stop by in Land Cruisers to check handbags for condoms, but Elahiyeh honors the age-old Iranian principle of veiled surfaces and highly embroidered interiors. Indeed, when de Bellaigue and his Iranian wife invite one of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s former hoodlums to lunch — an Indian meal — the man and his wife marvel over the apartment’s interior design.