Another new memoir, In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs, by Christopher de Bellaigue, provides an instructive comparison. De Bellaigue, a British journalist married to an Iranian woman, lived in Tehran during the same years as Moaveni. His book is a work of reportage and contemporary history, loosely framed by de Bellaigue's fraught relationship with a former revolutionary named Mr. Zarif. Although de Bellaigue speaks Persian and, thanks to his marriage, is immersed in Iranian private life, Mr. Zarif and the other erstwhile activists de Bellaigue pursues treat him with a certain distance and suspicion. They call him Reza Ingilisi, or English Reza (Reza is the ceremonial name that his wife gave him, and that he uses whenever he senses that "Christopher" will be difficult "or even distasteful" to pronounce). Throughout his adventures, de Bellaigue's criticism of post-revolution Iran is implicit, but unlike Moaveni, whose crushing scorn coexists with a strong sense of connection to a place she'll be stuck with no matter what she writes, his observations betray the frustration of a foreigner who realizes both the journalistic and even the human obligation to suspend ultimate judgment.

One day, de Bellaigue and Mr. Zarif are talking about the condition of the country, and Mr. Zarif--a proud man--admits to the author that Iran is in a sorry state. De Bellaigue describes his own reaction:

I'd had similar feelings. Why doesn't anything work? Why does nothing happen on time? Why is everything so crappy and falling apart? Is it useful to spend so much energy mourning a man who died more than thirteen hundred years ago? But there was a distance between myself and Iran. I would never be Iranian. (You cannot become Iranian--not spiritually. You have to be born one, like a Hindu.) But Mr Zarif was Iranian, and so these thoughts were acute, a kind of self-flagellation.

De Bellaigue's distance, then, provides a kind of reprieve, and perhaps even a measure of clarity.

So who gets to speak for Iran? Questions of authenticity are not, of course, unique to the Islamic Republic, but the high stakes of the current political climate, as well as the built-in subjectivity of exile psychology complicate these published chronicles of life in Iran today. A more basic hurdle to understanding the country is that Iran is a real insider society: a cultural quirk known as tarof obscures every social interaction. Tarof is a way of saying things you don't mean, whether offering a tenth helping of food, refusing to accept payment for a major service or responding to "see you later" with an idiom that translates to "I'll die for you." (De Bellaigue calls tarof "ceremonial insincerity," and remarks, "Iran is the only country I know where hypocrisy is prized as a social and commercial skill.") Tarof is art--not malice or trickery--and when skillfully employed it is one of the most charming customs in Iranian social life. But it is an elaborate, nonlinear form of communication that can tire even lifelong practitioners with its hall-of-mirrors obfuscation. You can't just land in Tehran with a map and a phrase book and figure the place out.

And yet, the potential consequence of this loophole of identity politics, where the native's wisdom is often held up as unimpeachable, can be equally worrisome--especially when Washington phones for advice. For the past few years, cohorts of Iranian exiles have worked closely with neoconservatives in Washington on the possibility of regime change in Iran. In Los Angeles, émigrés broadcast satellite television programs encouraging (and sometimes organizing) protests on the streets of Tehran. Some exiles have pipe dreams of reinstating the royalty, while others envision a secular, constitutional democracy in their lost homeland. Their views, informed by real-life experience with Iranian society, are an important part of the conversation. But perhaps exile also lends itself to a unique form of extremism, a kind of defensive reaction to the psychological burden of having been ejected from a place, a way of managing the sting of reality against the sweetness of nostalgia that no longer holds.

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