My paper argues that Sonallah Ibrahim’s1992 novel, Zaat, provides a theoretically sophisticated narrative of Egypt’s fast-growing consumer society—what we might term its ongoing infitah. Academic writing on the subject of Egypt’s consumer culture is only now beginning to catch up with its subject matter. Ibrahim’s novel is noteworthy for its early attempt to historicize this sea-change in the Egyptian lifestyle, which introduced a new pace and intensity into the rhythms of consumption. Zaat provides a narrative of this consumer culture’s emergence, as well as developing some of tools needed for its critique. The novel is also noteworthy for the blackly humorous way that it registers the effects of a massive flood of commodities on the realm of what Henri Lefebvre calls “the everyday”—the realm of gossip and desire, taste and temporality. The world of Zaat is a quotidian world of commodities: its characters are determined—typologically speaking, but also in their own minds—by the (reified) things that they own, or buy, or wish they could purchase. In my paper, I focus on the four most significant of these objects: the television, the automobile, food, and newspapers. In each case I attempt to explain the centrality of these objects, both to the novel and to the Egyptian historical experience it tries to narrate. This requires that I give some intellectual and sociological context for the introduction of these various objects and technologies into Egypt. So, for example, in speaking of the television, I borrow some ideas from the work of anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod to show the ways in which the female characters of Zaat are figured as what she calls “objects of development.” In the case of food, a perishable commodity, I try to show how Zaat’s various adventures with false expiration dates and rotten vegetables can be read as an attempt, in the words of Arjun Appardurai, “to re-situate consumption in time.” Ibrahim shows that the ever-more rapid temporalities of modern consumption are only effective when they distinguish themselves from a more generalized condition of rancidness, corruption and disintegration, which is the physical and political climate of Ibrahim’s novel. In a concluding section, I attempt to show that Ibrahim’s focus on the realm of the everyday—a focus that is a constant in his literary production—is one way of understanding his method of “documentary” fiction, which I argue should be read as a powerful new mode of realism.