There are two wolves inside Kaveh Akbars’ Martyr! – a poet’s novel and a Stunning Debut. Poet’s novels are oblique, delicately shaped, and luxuriate in language; Stunning Debuts are obvious, showy, and designed to get Attention, first from agents and then from readers. The novel swings between these two poles, at times enthralling in its quietude, at others entirely groan-worthy in its narrative pandering; it is something of an odd experience to read a good novel fighting an internal battle against a bad novel. It ends up on juuuuuust on the right side of the ledger, though it makes me a bit queasy thinking about whatever comes next.
Martyr! – exclamation point and all, so that every time I mention the book to someone else I have to use a little upward inflection, just like the film mother! – follows Cyrus Shams, a poet and recovering addict living in a slightly fictionalized version of the college town of West Lafayette, Indiana. (You can’t fool my Midwestern eyes, I know Purdue when I see it.) Cyrus1 is a first-generation Iranian immigrant; his mother, Roya, was murdered on Iran Air Flight 655, shot down by a US battleship, and his grieving father, Ali, moved with a young Cyrus to the US shortly after. Roya is more of a memory of absence to Cyrus than a real person, a hanging signifier of misfortune, and he lives a sort of death-obsessed life, forever knowing that life can be taken away capriciously at any time. This youthful knowledge isn’t quite the best for what we’d call a healthy relationship with alcohol2 and so, by college, Cyrus is down and out at rock bottom. The novel begins with his moment of realization, the turning point towards AA and sobriety, and then flashes forward to relative stability, as much stability as a year and a half of sobriety will get you. The question becomes: once you’re sober, what’s next? Cyrus, who has a not-sizable enough inheritance from the US government – oops, sorry we killed your mom – decides that he’ll get to work on a book about martyrs (!) across history, about people who died for something. Besides fitting into his thanatoid obsession, the book of martyrs is also a vessel for another sickness-unto obsession: fame, because what writer of any kind – yes, even poets – doesn’t secretly harbor a wish that their words will propel them to immortality.3
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