A WONDERFULLY STRANGE DELIGHT
Martyr! Kaveh Akbar Knopf
In 1988, the crew of the USS Vincennes mistook Iran Air Flight 655 for a fighter jet and shot it down, killing almost 300 passengers. In acclaimed poet Kaveh Akbar's first novel, these casualties include the mother of Cyrus Shams, who subsequently grows up in America ruminating on his identity and self-representation in a hostile culture.
At the novel's opening, Cyrus — a late-20s orphan, threadbare addict in recovery and Midwestern poet — works a part-time acting job at a hospital. He feels it is “his calling,” pretending to be a dying patient for the benefit of doctors-in-training. But after a prickly encounter with a medical student whose “Yankee patrician veneer” he “reflexively hated,” and a subsequent argument with his AA sponsor, Cyrus confronts what has always lurked behind his addictive self-sabotage: “The big pathological sad. Whether I'm actually thinking about it or not. It's like a giant bowling ball on the bed, everything kind of rolls into it.”
He is writing a book about martyrs, a project that might persuade him to kill himself at the end; he isn't sure yet. Shame-ridden Cyrus is the sun around which Martyr! moves. The writing evokes shades of Denis Johnson — in the gutted, elegiac quality of Train Dreams but also flashes of the hapless anti-hero of Emergency.
It is sumptuous with metaphors, at their best when animating Cyrus's childhood: “The Shams men began their lives in America awake, unnaturally alert, like two windows with the blinds torn off.” With a kaleidoscope of perspectives that illuminate almost 40 years of history, the battlefields of the Iran-iraq War and dreamlike scenes outside of time, the novel is obsessed with how “meaningless” individual suffering can become legible “at the level of empire,” asking what turns a death into a martyrdom.
At times, Martyr! embraces coincidence with both arms. To give his project — and the plot — its principal direction, Cyrus travels from Indiana to New York to meet Orkideh, a terminally ill Iranian artist who has a closer connection to him than he realizes. Her last show aims to make her death meaningful by her inhabiting a museum, speaking with visitors about dying. Cyrus loses nothing by undertaking this journey (he is “the definition of available,” says his friend and lover Zee), and Orkideh quickly warms to the engagement.
But the reader may forgive the convenience of this plotting for two reasons. First, the artist's dry wit counterbalances Cyrus's obsession with death, mystics and poetry; “all the Persian checkboxes,” she quips. Second, Cyrus's backstory and journey fall into the long shadow of archetype: He's an orphan; he has emerged from the underworld of addiction with unhealing psychic and physical wounds; he treats Zee like a sidekick; and he is on an existential quest that leads him to three meetings with the oracle-like Orkideh. These lines give Martyr! the suggestion of a novelistic shape as it follows its more meandering questions.
In the hands of a lesser writer with an agenda, this material could be esoteric and tedious, but Akbar's narrative maintains a glorious sense of whimsy.