Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

File under: Boy’s Club

Another recommendation from a friend: she texted me a photo of the cover and said I had to read it. Her encouragement along with Tommy Orange’s blurb on the front of the book “Kaveh Akbar is one of my favorite writers. Ever.” had me in the bookstore later that week. 

I’m having a complicated response to this work. 

I’m reminded of how decades ago, I became immersed in the beauty of the underwater world during a documentary on cable tv: the narrator introduced me to each beautiful plant and animal one at a time for about 55 minutes. Then in the last 5, a trawling net descended on all of my new friends, landing on the sea floor, kicking up the aquatic equivalent of dust to destroy all that I had just fallen in love with. A cruel maneuver, I thought, even as I saw how the point was to get me to care enough to take action to protect the natural world against industrial encroachment. 

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is the opposite: he sketches existentialism and isolation for 311 pages. I leafed through all of them because I’m a (n INFJ, enneagram 4, quasi-depressive) sucker for sentences of poetic brilliance, images of thoughts I’m sure we’ve all had strung together that, in relief, illustrates the machinery and the output of the imperialist, colonialist, white supremacist patriarchy. He preached, and I turned the pages.

Along the way, I recognized the form of this book- it is a near-carbon copy of There, There by none other than Tommy Orange. I struggle with the overall derivative structure even as I’m gobbling up each sentence. I wonder as I’m reading what the acknowledgements will say? NPR’s Fresh Air hasn’t read Tommy Orange, because their blurb says “Martyr! is so much its own creation that comparisons don’t help.” Are they even reading books over there? 

When the big twist (not a spoiler, it’s in the back cover copy) happened toward the end,  I worked myself into a froth of near-fury asking myself questions like “is Kaveh Akbar queer?” (he better be! <internet search says he is>) “Why is it that amab people are still entitled to write the stories of afab people?” (patriarchy). “What is the percentage of amab published writers to others?” (I can’t look!).

In the last 10 pages, personal and local redemption in the form of queer hope (3.2%)  appears against the (98.6%) nightmare of oppression and humanity. It feels a bit cruel like the nature documentary I saw. My experience does validate that the mountain leading to queer joy is indeed a tall and steep scramble, and having climbed it; maybe I’m not the audience for the “documentary,” especially if the “documentary” is “fiction,” where “anything is possible.” 

If I were to have lunch with Akbar, I bet we would align on more than we would not. We are probably on the same team, and our unity is critical. My beef, at the end of the day, isn’t with the author. His craft is beautiful. He and Tommy Orange are masters of characterization. I can learn from them both. My beef is with Publishing. What a fucking racket. 

And the first two sentences of the acknowledgments: “Thank you, Tommy Orange: bandmate, maestro. This novel would not exist without your example on and off the page.”