A conflicted book review: Martyr!

(Spoiler Alert)

There are a lot of reasons to enjoy Kaveh Akbar’s new novel Martyr!, and I will review a few before I tell you why I struggled with loving it myself. To start with, the writing is amazing. There are sentences we’d all kill to write on every page. Here’s one about New York that I just loved:

Pigeons tucked themselves into the soft-edged letters of Duane Reade sign, the cradles in the D’s and E’s and R full of sticks and leaves and hair. 

It’s also written by an author who is 35 and as such I appreciated a kind of self awareness from the MC (who, it should be said is not the writer and also…)

I was the kid in first grade who still couldn’t tie my own shoes but would say things like ‘I’m ambiguous'‘ about whether I wanted peanut butter or cheese crackers.

The prose breaks every rule you’ve ever read in any writing book or learned in any workshop–there’s a non-linear structure, some scenes describe dreams, there are multiple perspectives, we have thinly veiled autobiographical elements, there are even pages dedicated to poetry attributed to the microsoft word documents of the main character, for god’s sake. And even while managing to do every traditional don’t do this unless you’re a genius technique, he still manages to pull off a completely delicious twist in the final pages. This, as many well-known writers have recognized, (Karen Russel calls it the best novel she’s ever read, Mary Karr is blurbed on the back, it’s Roxane Gay book club selection for February) is all insanely hard to do. 

Also kudos go out to any book that calls out America as a racist country capable of inexcusable violence and mind numbingly overbearing capitalism in which our best bet is to be critical of any media it makes. Nobody at this point should expect a book to get by without acknowledging that. But this one does it so well.

“It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store,” says the prophetic character, Orkideh. As I grieved my cat, my little ball of orange fluff, that white tummy where the fur was the softest, I underlined this part.

And yet, there was a sinking feeling in my stomach in the first chunk of pages when the main character’s mother is described (by the author) as having given birth with no pain at all. I just felt like, oh boy. I mean, this seems very convenient. For the main character. 

As I read on I enjoyed the writing more and more but also began to see that the book just might not pass the Bechdel’s test and in fact it does not until the very end, unless you count a scene in which two women talk about giraffes. Or (PLOT SPOILER) a scene in which two women have sex while listening to the Rolling Stones. (I may note here that I feel that the writer has never listened to the Indigo Girls). 

Perhaps I’m just uncomfortable because one of the characters calls out Adrienne Rich for being a trans exclusive radical feminist and maybe she was. Perhaps I wish the MC did not walk deliberately right PAST the Dinner Party exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum as if it’s barely worth acknowledging. Maybe it bothered me that the artist character is so close to the performance artist Marina Abramović but the writer doesn’t include a nod to her until the very very end of the book (as if she’s so unknown that the writer barely needs to say he knows who she is). Oh I can just feel my blood start to boil.

It reminds me of something. It reminds me of how I felt when I read Junot Diaz’s book This Is How You Lose Her. It reminds me of the anger I feel when male writers get away with using tropes about women and women’s stories to support their acts of artistry.

Maybe this is all fine. Maybe not every book has to take on gender equality and besides, the main character in the book is coming to terms with his homosexuality, so, you know, it’s fair for femaleness to be something to contend with.

“Each person throbs like an idiot moon,”  is a line in one of the poems saved in a document kept by the main character. I might actually say, and I’m not here to prove it, that this book has a kind of obsession with masculinity. The main character’s sponsor is a cowboy. The main characters are all men except for a woman who remains a mystery. The other women are observers or information givers and are portrayed as at their best when observing themselves. The men are left unwitnessed and that is their great grief. 

It wasn’t until the very end that I really had a shock. It wasn’t just that the plot twist was cleverly put off until it almost seemed like there wouldn’t be one. It was that the twist itself was contingent up on the main character’s mother being NOT a martyr, as the main character had been raised to believe, but a woman who abandoned her husband and son, became a lesbian, lied about her identity, married for fame and achievement and achieved success as the most SELFISH CREATURE of all time - a single woman artist. An ART MONSTER. Who is revealed a such before she dies. And only then does the main character accept responsibility for his own life.

So I was left wondering if this book was projecting violence onto the territory of motherhood? Or at least onto the body of one who wanted more? Or if the main point was that main character found freedom when he realized his mother had found hers.

What do you think?!