Cyrus Shams earns money by pretending to receive terrible news. At a university hospital, he plays patients and relatives so that medical students can practice difficult conversations. Then he evaluates their sympathy. Grief has a script, an allotted time, and a form to fill in afterward.
His own life is considerably less organized. A young poet in Indiana, Cyrus is newly sober, his parents are gone, and removing the things that were destroying him has not automatically supplied a reason to get through the afternoon. He has survived a period of chaos. What to do with the survival is another question.
Kaveh Akbar’s first novel, Martyr!, gives that question an awkward, funny, sometimes infuriating person to inhabit. Cyrus wants to write about martyrs: people whose deaths appear to have acquired a meaning larger than themselves. When he hears about a dying painter who is receiving visitors at the Brooklyn Museum, he decides to meet her.
His friend Zee goes with him. At last there is an address to travel to, rather than another thought to circle. There will also be people at the other end who have not agreed to become illustrations of his ideas.
A very serious question for a light bulb
The authorized opening begins before the hospital work, with Cyrus in a dirty bedroom asking God for a sign. A bulb appears to flicker. Was that the sign, or merely the wiring? He would like another demonstration, preferably one that leaves less room for interpretation.
The scene is funny because his demand is both absurd and recognizable. He wants certainty delivered in a form he can use. The comedy does not cancel the urgency underneath it. Someone can be ridiculous while genuinely needing a reason to go on.
That double register is an immediate reason to try Akbar’s prose. The sentence reaches toward the divine; the room supplies dirt, bodily discomfort, and bad electrical infrastructure. Cyrus’s grand questions are not allowed to float free of the person asking them. Nor is that person dismissed because he occasionally sounds grandiose.
The later hospital episode makes the friction sharper. A simulated encounter ought to be safer than a real one. Everyone knows a performance is taking place. Yet Cyrus brings his own dissatisfaction into the room and deliberately makes things difficult for a nervous medical student.
Importantly, the scene does not simply expose the student as incapable of care. As Cyrus begins talking about his actual distress, she grows calmer and listens. She offers a considered response and gently brings him back into the exercise. By the end of the excerpt, he is embarrassed, behaves agreeably, and writes her an excellent report before leaving in shame.
That turn is more interesting than a victory for his cleverness. The person he can unsettle is also capable of answering him. She does not have to be as verbally dazzling as he is to understand something useful about his situation.
Cyrus is not an appealing protagonist because suffering has made him reliably kind. It has not. He can want understanding while making it difficult for anyone to approach him. Reading him means allowing those facts to coexist, rather than making compassion conditional on his passing a character test.
The writing project belongs to this same unsettled life. Having literary ambitions, or an elegant account of one’s paralysis, does not get the work done. There are still bills, jobs, and the people one has agreed to meet. Art matters here partly because it has to find a place among those obligations.
A public catastrophe and a private absence
In the family history Cyrus has grown up knowing, his mother Roya died when he was a baby, on the passenger plane shot down by the US Navy in 1988. The novel places that account within the real catastrophe of Iran Air Flight 655. His father Ali subsequently raised him in the American Midwest, working in poultry farming.
The two parents occupy different kinds of distance. His mother is bound to a publicly recorded event, but public knowledge cannot give him memories of being with her. His father was present in ordinary life, yet presence did not mean the son understood everything about the man. After Ali’s death, things that might once have been asked become questions without a readily available listener.
It is easy to see why a young writer might be drawn toward exceptional deaths from this position. Some endings are remembered, named, and made to stand for a cause. Long years of work and care can disappear from public notice almost immediately. Perhaps an extraordinary ending could rescue an otherwise scattered existence from insignificance.
That is Cyrus’s temptation, not a conclusion the reader needs to accept. The desire to understand the dead can become entangled with the desire to establish one’s own importance. He is grieving, but he is also anxious about what his life adds up to. A compelling idea can carry both motives without keeping them neatly apart.
This is where the book’s movement beyond his immediate viewpoint matters. The novel gives other voices and periods space alongside his story. His family can gradually become more than a set of absences organized around his need. We meet them because of him; that does not make his questions the only questions their lives contain.
There is no need to disclose the family revelations to make that invitation clear. A person who seems central to our explanation of ourselves may have had concerns, attachments, and reasons that the explanation cannot accommodate. The possibility alone makes Cyrus’s search less predictable.
The painter has her own conversation to have
The painter is Orkideh. Her project, DEATH-SPEAK, makes conversation with visitors part of the final stage of her life. She is dying, and she has chosen to bring that experience into a public artistic setting.
For Cyrus, the premise seems almost uncannily suited to his interests. Here is someone doing something deliberate with death. He can go to New York and ask her about it. The arrangement promises an encounter with the subject he has been trying to write into focus.
But the promise contains a problem. A person is not a ready-made answer simply because her circumstances resemble one’s question. Orkideh can have a different emphasis, change the direction of a conversation, or decline the significance a visitor wants to assign her.
That makes the journey more inviting than a pilgrimage to a sage who already knows the meaning of life. Orkideh remains an artist making a difficult choice. What does the public setting make possible? What do visitors hope to receive? What are they prepared to notice when the person before them does not fulfill that hope?
Outside the museum, Zee complicates Cyrus’s search in a more everyday way. He is a roommate, a close friend, and sometimes a lover. He cares about Cyrus, but his presence is not simply a service supplied to the protagonist’s artistic development. An idea that excites Cyrus can look alarming to the person traveling beside him.
The difference in scale is worth holding onto. Cyrus is wondering whether his life can mean something to the world. Someone is already spending actual time with him. Neither question settles the other, but an obsession with the first can make the second strangely difficult to see.
In her review for The Brooklyn Rail, Mandana Chaffa draws attention to intimacy, vulnerability, and love. It is a useful adjustment to expectations. Death is the loud subject. The effort of approaching another person is part of the novel’s movement too. Neither needs to be reduced to a lesson about appreciating what one has.
What the exclamation mark allows
Martyr is a heavy word. The punctuation after it is almost cheeky. It leaves a little instability in the title, a suggestion that earnestness will have to share the page with embarrassment and wit.
Akbar was already known as a poet before this novel. His prose does not reserve poetry for occasional beautiful descriptions. Manuscript fragments, dreams, imagined conversations, and changes of voice enter the narrative itself. A reader interested in language has something to follow besides the progress of the New York trip.
That abundance also asks for a particular kind of patience. A striking image may interrupt forward motion; a new voice may require a change of attention. Kirkus’s review praises the novel’s originality and force while finding some of its dreams and alternative narratives less successful. Readers who prefer a restrained, steadily linear story may find the range excessive.
Nor should the humor be mistaken for emotional safety. Addiction and despair remain serious presences. The comedy makes Cyrus more alive on the page; it does not make his difficulties harmless.
In India Ennenga’s interview with Akbar for The Believer, he describes his admiration for art that acknowledges the inadequacy of its own medium. A work reaches toward an experience without claiming it can contain the whole of it. He also distinguishes writing from the work of care that happens away from the page.
Those remarks offer a good way to approach the opening. Cyrus may produce a powerful sentence about life. He still has to leave the room, listen to a reply, and spend the rest of the day with people.
The question that makes me want to follow him is not whether he will finally find a statement impressive enough to justify his existence. It is whether another person can get through while he is busy composing one.
He has prepared plenty of questions for the painter. Once he sits down in front of her, the conversation will no longer be entirely his.