I feel like there's this industry trend of upmarket, "provocative" It Books that are given covers with a single bold color and a logo-style title, all as a kind of shortcut to "instant icon" status. (Similar to brat, Barbie, etc). It's a good branding exercise, but when so many books hype themselves up in that unspoken way, it's hard not to inevitably underwhelm consumers.
This is SO good YES. When the marketing of a book overshadows the story itself, it's so easy to get caught up in the trendy branding rather than the actual writing.
I read this for a liberal book club and one of the women hypothesized that the protagonist is dying after contracting blood poisoning from doing erotic yardplay and the entire back half of the book is his deathbed fantasia about having a famous mother who bequeathed him a queer artistic legacy. He desperately creates his own dying vision in which he finally achieves this stereotypical liberal success but none of it happened except him hitting himself in the foot with an axe and putting duct tape on top of it. It's a little like Phillip K Dick if you read it that way.
There’s a particular violence in reading a book that reaches you, and then watching someone else slice it open with the dullest, most self-satisfied scalpel imaginable.
This reads like it’s auditioning for a Very Online dinner party, where wit matters more than insight and earnestness is treated like a contagion. It performs disillusionment, mistaking cynicism for clarity, and in doing so, utterly fails to engage with what Martyr!, or any book for that matter worth reading, does - it says much beyond the dinner party conversation you're trying to have with substack here.
Martyr! isn’t trying to impress you with its polish or its politics. It’s not a book that wants to dazzle you with cleverness. It’s a novel written by someone who clearly knows the bone-deep absurdity of trying to live inside a body, inside a faith, inside an addiction. You know what addiction looks like written, if you have gone through it.
To write about that experience without either romanticising it or turning it into a TED Talk like Akbar has in Martyr! and all of his astounding poetry, takes a rare kind of discipline. That's a kind that comes from ruin, not graduate school. And yeah guess what, you can experience both.
And yes, sometimes that results in overwrought shoes-as-ideology passages or characters who spiral without arc. But if you’ve ever been inside a brain that can’t decide what’s more insufferable, the cruelty of the world or your own performance of awareness—then you know exactly what that passage is doing.
Reviews like this, and that's most reviews, fail to differentiate between over-intellectualisation and self-aware collapse, is telling of why so much surface level fiction is published these days. They don’t seem to recognise that the verbosity is the point.
Akbar’s characters are not mouthpieces for ideology, but casualties of it—haunted by the endless mirrors of meaning they can’t stop walking into. The critique that Martyr! is too wordy, too philosophically bloated, is like complaining that a panic attack has too many symptoms. It misses the point, or ignores it, because it can’t feel it.
The takedown isn’t just of the book, it’s of anyone who might have seen themselves in it. That pomegranate line? It is great, but it’s also a moment of devastating clarity.
It's the sort of line that punctures a lifetime of shame, of inherited cultural performance, of feeling like a fraud in both languages. Reducing it to a nod for the “half-Iranian Americans” to collect and move on with is such a willfully shallow reading it feels cruel. It's like mocking the idea that anyone could need any line in any book.
And that's what really grates: the total lack of generosity. This isn’t an honest wrestling with the book’s failures—it’s a refusal to meet it where it lives. It’s someone glancing into a stranger’s open wound and saying, “eh, could’ve been messier in a more curated way.” There’s no curiosity in the critique. No wondering why the book might have chosen excess, or what it means for a novel about addiction, God, and belonging to occasionally collapse under the weight of its own questions. There’s only the pretense of authority. And in that sense, the review is far guiltier of what it accuses Martyr! of: being hollow, self-regarding, and allergic to feeling.
Maybe this book is precious to me, and that's where my commentary comes from, but I hope you see the forest in the trees for what I'm saying here. Loving a messy book doesn’t make you naïve. Believing that literature should bleed doesn’t make you sentimental. It just makes you human.
And Martyr!—for all its holes and tangents and contradictions—knows what it’s like to try to be human, and fail, and try again anyway.
I feel so seen, because after finishing this book, I truly did not understand the hype. Not only was Cyrus an extremely annoying narrator BUT the plot about his mom was just so unbelievable and left me with so so many questions. I kept reading in the hopes that Cyrus would hit his big moment of self-realization, make amends to the people in his life, make peace with his mom’s death, accept sobriety, reconnect with his uncle, visit Persia etc., etc., I hated how stupid the whole thing was.
This exactly!!! Reading contemporary fiction feels like a social experiment these days...like Cyrus had so many opportunities to grow/change, but instead the plot just kept getting wackier while he wandered around New York City thinking about nothing. For a story that tackled so many themes, I felt moved by absolutely zero of them.
This has been something that I have been torn about. While the overtly didactic nature of media transcends just literary fiction and permeates throughout all of television and movies, I can't help but think of the scene in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. In it, Prince Myshkin very overtly and didactically expresses his disdain for Catholicism. The diatribe he goes on is a 1 for 1 expression of the author's views. Is what's going on here really all that different from something we would consider a classic? I've never read this book BTW and haven't gotten around to any contemporary literature except Murakami, who is very much a show don't tell writer. So, my opinions are not that well based.
I've never read The Idiot, but this is a really great point...obviously things should be more nuanced than just "character-reflects-author's-political-opinions-therefore-book-bad". With Martyr!, though, it seemed like ALL of Cyrus's inner monologue was just an extension of some pretty grating views from the author, and I think that (in combination with the ridiculous plot and unbelievable characters) made it a tough read for me.
Good points. I feel like the character of Gabe represents your argument about the novel pretty well (in a “the critique is coming from inside the house” kind of way). Wish there was more of him/the addiction plot line!
I really enjoyed this book actually. I feel like the cynical and convoluted intellectualism of Cyrus was being criticized. Especially with the way the book ended. But this was also my first time reading anything by the author, so maybe he just is overly intellectual. Although to me it came across as humor
I love the way that Akbar wasted my time with anti-capitalist lip service, just for us to both know that it does no good and then for him to tell me that he knows that it does no good. 👏👏👏
I started Martyr based on all the hype. I was hoping it would be something like Lost Children Archive but for martyrdom. It is so poorly written on a sentence level and Cyrus is so cliché. The first chapter worried me and my worries were never assuaged. I read this post a while back and had not made the connection until I read that pomegranate line. then I remembered this post and thought ohhh shit. just came back to say this critique is so valid and I made it 63 pages before it went in the DNF pile. Thank you for giving me some time back.
I feel like there's this industry trend of upmarket, "provocative" It Books that are given covers with a single bold color and a logo-style title, all as a kind of shortcut to "instant icon" status. (Similar to brat, Barbie, etc). It's a good branding exercise, but when so many books hype themselves up in that unspoken way, it's hard not to inevitably underwhelm consumers.
This is SO good YES. When the marketing of a book overshadows the story itself, it's so easy to get caught up in the trendy branding rather than the actual writing.
With this in mind, it's an iconic cover (disclosure: I have yet to read the book).
I read this for a liberal book club and one of the women hypothesized that the protagonist is dying after contracting blood poisoning from doing erotic yardplay and the entire back half of the book is his deathbed fantasia about having a famous mother who bequeathed him a queer artistic legacy. He desperately creates his own dying vision in which he finally achieves this stereotypical liberal success but none of it happened except him hitting himself in the foot with an axe and putting duct tape on top of it. It's a little like Phillip K Dick if you read it that way.
I quite literally read this comment open-mouthed I'm both horrified and in awe thank you so much for passing this theory along.
There’s a particular violence in reading a book that reaches you, and then watching someone else slice it open with the dullest, most self-satisfied scalpel imaginable.
This reads like it’s auditioning for a Very Online dinner party, where wit matters more than insight and earnestness is treated like a contagion. It performs disillusionment, mistaking cynicism for clarity, and in doing so, utterly fails to engage with what Martyr!, or any book for that matter worth reading, does - it says much beyond the dinner party conversation you're trying to have with substack here.
Martyr! isn’t trying to impress you with its polish or its politics. It’s not a book that wants to dazzle you with cleverness. It’s a novel written by someone who clearly knows the bone-deep absurdity of trying to live inside a body, inside a faith, inside an addiction. You know what addiction looks like written, if you have gone through it.
To write about that experience without either romanticising it or turning it into a TED Talk like Akbar has in Martyr! and all of his astounding poetry, takes a rare kind of discipline. That's a kind that comes from ruin, not graduate school. And yeah guess what, you can experience both.
And yes, sometimes that results in overwrought shoes-as-ideology passages or characters who spiral without arc. But if you’ve ever been inside a brain that can’t decide what’s more insufferable, the cruelty of the world or your own performance of awareness—then you know exactly what that passage is doing.
Reviews like this, and that's most reviews, fail to differentiate between over-intellectualisation and self-aware collapse, is telling of why so much surface level fiction is published these days. They don’t seem to recognise that the verbosity is the point.
Akbar’s characters are not mouthpieces for ideology, but casualties of it—haunted by the endless mirrors of meaning they can’t stop walking into. The critique that Martyr! is too wordy, too philosophically bloated, is like complaining that a panic attack has too many symptoms. It misses the point, or ignores it, because it can’t feel it.
The takedown isn’t just of the book, it’s of anyone who might have seen themselves in it. That pomegranate line? It is great, but it’s also a moment of devastating clarity.
It's the sort of line that punctures a lifetime of shame, of inherited cultural performance, of feeling like a fraud in both languages. Reducing it to a nod for the “half-Iranian Americans” to collect and move on with is such a willfully shallow reading it feels cruel. It's like mocking the idea that anyone could need any line in any book.
And that's what really grates: the total lack of generosity. This isn’t an honest wrestling with the book’s failures—it’s a refusal to meet it where it lives. It’s someone glancing into a stranger’s open wound and saying, “eh, could’ve been messier in a more curated way.” There’s no curiosity in the critique. No wondering why the book might have chosen excess, or what it means for a novel about addiction, God, and belonging to occasionally collapse under the weight of its own questions. There’s only the pretense of authority. And in that sense, the review is far guiltier of what it accuses Martyr! of: being hollow, self-regarding, and allergic to feeling.
Maybe this book is precious to me, and that's where my commentary comes from, but I hope you see the forest in the trees for what I'm saying here. Loving a messy book doesn’t make you naïve. Believing that literature should bleed doesn’t make you sentimental. It just makes you human.
And Martyr!—for all its holes and tangents and contradictions—knows what it’s like to try to be human, and fail, and try again anyway.
That Substack post doesn’t.
I feel so seen, because after finishing this book, I truly did not understand the hype. Not only was Cyrus an extremely annoying narrator BUT the plot about his mom was just so unbelievable and left me with so so many questions. I kept reading in the hopes that Cyrus would hit his big moment of self-realization, make amends to the people in his life, make peace with his mom’s death, accept sobriety, reconnect with his uncle, visit Persia etc., etc., I hated how stupid the whole thing was.
This exactly!!! Reading contemporary fiction feels like a social experiment these days...like Cyrus had so many opportunities to grow/change, but instead the plot just kept getting wackier while he wandered around New York City thinking about nothing. For a story that tackled so many themes, I felt moved by absolutely zero of them.
low key feel this way about some of Sally Rooney's books.
Beautiful World Where Are You immediately came to mind as I read this. Those emails…
Cool cover though!
BTW, Baseball is life. You either love Baseball or you’re wrong
This has been something that I have been torn about. While the overtly didactic nature of media transcends just literary fiction and permeates throughout all of television and movies, I can't help but think of the scene in The Idiot by Dostoyevsky. In it, Prince Myshkin very overtly and didactically expresses his disdain for Catholicism. The diatribe he goes on is a 1 for 1 expression of the author's views. Is what's going on here really all that different from something we would consider a classic? I've never read this book BTW and haven't gotten around to any contemporary literature except Murakami, who is very much a show don't tell writer. So, my opinions are not that well based.
I've never read The Idiot, but this is a really great point...obviously things should be more nuanced than just "character-reflects-author's-political-opinions-therefore-book-bad". With Martyr!, though, it seemed like ALL of Cyrus's inner monologue was just an extension of some pretty grating views from the author, and I think that (in combination with the ridiculous plot and unbelievable characters) made it a tough read for me.
Good points. I feel like the character of Gabe represents your argument about the novel pretty well (in a “the critique is coming from inside the house” kind of way). Wish there was more of him/the addiction plot line!
Totally agree!! It's such a shame when the voice of reason and your favorite character disappears like four chapters in :/
Also you’re braver than me…I watched the first episode of girls this week and couldn’t continue
Martyr sucks so hard, it’s embarrassing, and heartening to know others have at least a little taste
Your editor seems really smart. And well read
My mom has an app if you send me a picture of the plant
2 shout outs today!!! 😍
I really enjoyed this book actually. I feel like the cynical and convoluted intellectualism of Cyrus was being criticized. Especially with the way the book ended. But this was also my first time reading anything by the author, so maybe he just is overly intellectual. Although to me it came across as humor
It’s like turning audio-description on in Netflix
what
I love the way that Akbar wasted my time with anti-capitalist lip service, just for us to both know that it does no good and then for him to tell me that he knows that it does no good. 👏👏👏
I started Martyr based on all the hype. I was hoping it would be something like Lost Children Archive but for martyrdom. It is so poorly written on a sentence level and Cyrus is so cliché. The first chapter worried me and my worries were never assuaged. I read this post a while back and had not made the connection until I read that pomegranate line. then I remembered this post and thought ohhh shit. just came back to say this critique is so valid and I made it 63 pages before it went in the DNF pile. Thank you for giving me some time back.