Here is a dilemma: I have read one of the most thought-provoking books in a while and would like to discuss the issues it raises, on multiple fronts. However, there is a major plot twist at the end, one that every review I’ve read – most of them GLOWING – has kept secret to avoid spoiling the reader’s reaction. Yet, that very plot twist opens a whole new perspective about everything else in the book. So what is a reviewer to do?

Tell you what: If you want to read the book, stop reading my musings now. You will be rewarded with a novel full of the most poetic language (some called it “half wised-up dude-speak, half soaring lyricism,” multiple takes on serious questions about contemporary life, and miraculous story telling that keeps you up until the book is finished.

I, on the other hand, will continue now with revealing the full story – and trying to find my own grip on the book, which I loved but had a hard time digesting (probably why I am writing at length about it here.) (I am annotating my text with photographs of street art from Brooklyn, where some of the story unfolds.)

The Persian lion for the Iranian main character of the novel, in approximation of the color of the Iranian flag, in my imagination -yes, yes I know, it’s more like the Rastafarian lion on the streets of Brooklyn, but indulge me….

“Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar was published last year, to great acclaim. Rarely have I seen so many critics elated and agreeing on so many details. (Here is the NYT, the New Yorker, NPR, and, for balance, something a bit more negative from the Guardian.) Akbar’s first novel (he is an award winning poet) is centered on Cyrus Shams, a young man who finds so little meaning in life that he attempts to derive meaning from death, trying to write a book about martyrs and reveling in occasional suicidal ideation that involves going out with a meaningful bang. Before you sigh “that sounds depressing,” rest assured, it is an extremely funny, laugh-out-loud book. Cyrus works, for example, as a mock patient in a medical school training program for doctors who need to communicate fatal diagnoses to patients and families. The encounters can be hilarious.

He is bi-sexual, trying to pass as not gay, recently graduated from an addiction program, and an orphan. His family comes from Iran, where he was born. He lost his mother as a baby, when she was shot out of the sky in a commercial airliner in 1988 by the USS Vincennes in Iranian airspace (an accident, they claimed.)

His father moves them to the US not much later and works himself to the bones at a chicken farm (mass production) trying to provide for his only child, a life of duty, blood, shit and feathers, that promptly ends with heart failure the minute Cyrus is off to college. Cyrus is mobbed as an immigrant, but neither immigration status nor his serious alcohol and drug addiction (and his miraculous ability to stay sober, once he is ready) are the main focus of the narrative.

The questions are how we find meaning in life, how we deal with loss, and how some losses are compounded by betrayal.

The story is told from different perspectives: Cyrus,

Zee, his sometimes lover and roommate who yearns for (not granted) reciprocity of his feelings,

the father,

an uncle who carries the notion of PTSD as an Iraq war veteran to new heights, (and revealing my stupid prejudices when I questioned the deep musical knowledge of an uneducated Iranian soldier,)

the mother (and a minuscule glimpse of her ex partner) all contribute.

If that sounds like too many perspectives, rest assured, they all meld to a decipherable image, little puzzle pieces gloriously true to their diverse voices. Interwoven are interludes that display the learnedness of the author: contemporary politics, literary allusions, bits and pieces of philosophy that beckons us to read up on them.

Zee convinces Cyrus to make a trip to NYC where an Iranian artist of renown is holding court at the Brooklyn Museum.

She is in the last stages of cancer and has decided to live and die in the museum, meeting people during the day who want to talk to her about death and dying, answering any and all questions, sort of a live installation. (Below are photographs from the Brooklyn museum. The museum is known for its Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, organized around The Dinner Party, an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art. The Dinner Party comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history. )

Cyrus meets her, feels curiously drawn to her, her immediate perceptions and appreciations of his ideas about martyrdom, and cannot wait to see her again. After two visits he suspects that she is actually his mother, which turns out to be true. Before he can confirm this, though, she ends her life, depriving him of any definite answers or connection, however short, and protecting herself from having to own up to her betrayal. He collapses after the news, and again after meeting with his mother’s ex partner who was and still is her gallery representative, confirming his suspicions.

As part of Groundswell’s Voices Her’d Visionaries program, a group of young women created A New Day, a mural theme of “Strong Women Build Safe Communities.” 2005 Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. Lead artist for the project was Katie Yamasaki.

The book ends in a dream sequence open to interpretation – Cyrus prays for death and it looks like he is going out in a volatile mix of love – something he was previously unable to feel – for Zee, and all kinds of imagery linked to glory. It might be that sepsis did him in (he had a festering foot wound that he ignored), froze to death (he is out in the cold on a Brooklyn park bench), that he died from sorrow, or it might be that he didn’t die at all and is just in need of an ambulance – take your pick. Anything but a glorious death, though, that would add meaning to a life squandered.

***

At this point I was torn. On the one hand, how could a mother abandon her child, including a trauma-inducing lie about the process, kept up to the bitter end? On the other hand, are we back to mother bashing, often our favorite mode when trying to explain the morbidity of young adults’ lives and fragile mental health? John Bowlby’s Attachment theories dominated psychology for many decades, with maternal attachment styles predicting (un)healthy social and psychological development of the infant. And it was just one generation ago that the medical establishment and psychoanalytical clinical approaches still viewed mothers as the cause for schizophrenia in their children. I was still taught that in grad school in clinical psychology courses in the early eighties, believe it or not.

It wasn’t until the mid-80ies that society opened up to other explanatory models, with Public Broadcasting shows like Madness by Jonathan Miller trying to educate about biological and physiological causes instead, now the dominant model in med schools. I am reminded of this mental illness in particular because of the new findings that it is frequently associated with autoimmune diseases – here is some research evidence that links treatment of autoimmune inflammation to reduction or disappearance of psychotic symptoms, and here is a recent New Yorker article about a human interest case. In this context you might also want to re-read an earlier New Yorker essay on the general problems with the Freudian approach. However, the same mother bashing was used for many other psychological problems of their offspring, from borderline to anti-social personality disorders. And the modern version of the “toxic mother”? Just look at what pops up at a cursory search of the internet – here are the first entries that popped up (I’d laugh if it wasn’t so depressing):

8 things that toxic mothers do; 17 surprising signs your Mom is toxic; Toxic Mother: Definition, Signs and how to Cope; 22 Signs of a toxic mother – choosing therapy.

Signs keep multiplying…..

Looking around from the Brooklyn Bridge.

So what do we know about Cyrus’ mother? She never wanted a child, got pregnant at the insistence of her husband. She feels stifled in marriage and an increasingly oppressive, theocratic society that robs her of all freedom, not able to breathe under the Mullahs. She falls briefly and intensely in love with another woman, and together they plot their escape, with switched roles dooming the lover to death by American missiles. She decides to live this lie and drowns her presumed (survivor) guilt and shame over the secretive abandonment in a monomaniacal devotion to art, with every creative act blotting out thoughts of destructive ones. She is never able again to form truly healthy, loving connections.

This was a poster for a play performed at The Invisible Dog 15 years ago, touching on some of the same issues of empty lives.

Is it her fault, then, that Cyrus became a drifter, eschewing responsibility in life (other than a sudden decision to get sober), failing to thrive despite loving friends, concerned sponsors

and certainly a nurturing and supportive father? Parents leave, for good reasons, and often to positive outcomes, since parental tension and depression have negative outcomes for child development. The fact that she seemed to have “been taken” from the family might even placate the sense of abandonment, replaced by a sense of anger at the warmongers in the world. Then again, the fact that she seemingly died a meaningless death, an accident statistic, might explain her son’s preoccupation with the deaths of martyrs, although when we read the snippets of his book in the making it seems rather a fan boy journey, than serious intellectual occupation with the topic of meaningfully trying to change the world.

I found it tempting to try and link Cyrus’ emptiness, his stimulation seeking and clandestine affairs, his inability to engage in faith, or applying himself to something worthwhile, to some “event”, some childhood experience. But aren’t we surrounded by young men like this, not all of whom had the hardship of losing a parent or immigrating to a xenophobic country? And in reverse, aren’t there many people who have gloriously overcome the traumatic events they went through and are living meaningful lives? So what is going on with generations marked by ennui, empty once you go below the surface? Why is there so much deep seated sadness in generations that did not face existential threat?

Just when you arrive at that question, though, the mother comes back in stark relief, refusing her son the answers she owes him, now that they face each other. Here we have true betrayal, and it makes Cyrus from a drifter into a tragic figure, in my view, with parental rejection ruthlessly targeting the child. Any fantasy that she would have, could have loved him, is now cut short, since her own needs mattered more.

Akbar does a fascinating, if frustrating, job in sticking to description rather than analysis of the psychological conundrums of those trying to escape hopelessness. He skillfully avoids sketching his characters in ways that would allow for simplistic explanations of their behaviors, from unabashed narcissism to addiction (art or drugs) as a means of obliteration. The result is a novel that keeps you wondering, looking for answers, curiously drawn to damaged characters and their struggles. A miraculous book and a troublesome one.

Music today is Songs of Hope – a kamâncheh album rooted in the ancient Persian dastgâh/maqâm tradition.