New(ish) Books
Kaveh Akbar and Jenny Erpenbeck
Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a discussion of two new-ish novels.
Best,
Sam
KAVEH AKBAR’s Martyr! (2024)
I enjoyed this.
Almost everything about the structure would seem to be unpromising. It takes all the much-traveled narrative paths of our era — the identity politics novel, the immigration novel, the recovery novel, the polyvocal novel — and sort of mashes them together. The gist of it is that Cyrus is ludicrously stuck in Indiana — no longer suffering from addiction but wallowing in self-pity — and then travels to New York to see a sort of Marina Abramović-plus show, in which the artist not only sits in an empty studio and talks to museum visitors but has terminal cancer. There’s a twist — which is far-from-convincing — but the experience allows Cyrus to get past his sense of himself as a victim and to become a productive artist.
The tropes are all there, but Martyr! is ahead of the curve through a sense of absolute hopelessness — of Cyrus facing a really pervasive, debilitating lack of meaning and coming face to face with an unremitting nihilism.
That comes through most strongly in the early chapters and it illuminates what’s behind so many immigrant novels — the idea that other cultures have a gnarled realism that is almost perfectly incompatible with American consumerism. This is what Martyr! at first seems to be about — the easy fun that Cyrus has as a medical actor tormenting the cheery, corporate med students with his histrionic complaints; and the absolute inability he has to translate the suffering in his background, the death of his mother in the USS Vincennes’ shoot down of Iran Air Flight 655, the trauma of his uncle in the Iran-Iraq War, the stolid minimum wage work of his father in an Indiana chicken farm to anything comprehensible to the bro-y, hipster-y culture of college town Indiana.
The inability to link up these experiences drives Cyrus into addiction, into a profound victim complex, and into a desperate desire to square the circle somehow, to extract meaning from meaningless — maybe through art or, when he gets stuck, through the half-baked idea of “living his poems.” As Cyrus says, thinking about his mother in a moment of deep depression, “My whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning.”
Like with Erpenbeck below, I read much of Martyr! thinking I’d come across something really special — a novel exploring an absolutely unbridgeable cultural and philosophical divide and constantly doing so with a bright wit. Akbar writes of an exchange with a med student that “the red light on the camera was blinking on and off like a firefly mocking the proceedings” and of a coffee shop patron that “he was typing furiously into his laptop, like a movie hacker trying to crack into the Pentagon.”
But then Akbar seems not quite to know what to do with Cyrus. Cyrus reads an article in the newspaper about an exhibit in New York, and our whole painstakingly-constructed Indiana setup is forgotten. Suddenly, Cyrus remembers that he has money — making his earlier struggles with abject poverty suddenly moot. To pad out Cyrus’ journey to New York, Akbar shifts to polyvocal mode, and we hear from Cyrus’ mother and uncle and mother’s girlfriend in 1980s Iran — none of which ever feels as lived-in as Cyrus’ story. Meanwhile, the twist so completely obviates the whole stated premise of the novel that Akbar has to really stretch to come up with a new meaning.
What Akbar hits on isn’t bad. It’s basically that Cyrus is being a big baby, that he needs to get past his sense of ineluctable tragedy and to adapt to what he describes as a more “pulverizingly mundane” idea of reality. The way it’s described to him by an older, wiser character is that you spend a long time dealing with your traumas and then there is a moment where you have to say to yourself “I am not the patient” and make way for others.
It’s a simple life lesson but elegantly stated by Akbar. It’s a nice-enough resolution of Cyrus’ mid-20s angst — and could have been achieved with a far-less-baroque plot. Martyr! is a case of a talented, engaging writer letting his plot get out ahead of the story he really wants to tell.
JENNY ERPENBECK’s Kairos (2021)
There was a book that I thought I was reading for much of the time that I was reading Kairos — and the book I thought I was reading I liked a great deal.
That book is a book for grown ups. It has no particular morality — it takes the spring-and-autumn affair between Katharina and Hans for granted as being something that can never really work, that is destructive for both of them, but is primary for both of them, the real heart of themselves. That book uses the expanse of time elegantly, with the unfolding of time revealing, very naturally, the truth of the relationship — Hans beginning to face old age and losing his attractiveness, Katharina going through her sexual exploration with boys her own age. That book is neatly balanced in perspective between Hans and Katharina but its real character is the shared cultural matter between them — the books and music they like, the way that everything they read or listen to has its own essence and unfolds in different ways for the two of them, so that “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” for instance, is the music they listen to and then becomes a favorite of Katharina and then becomes unbearable for Hans to listen to once Katharina admits that she played it, guilelessly, for a different boyfriend. And that book is all about shaving away layer after layer, getting to the real truth of things — the attraction of the early relationship leading, in due course, to boundless, unremitting jealousy; time and old age doing their work on the love affair; and the atrophy of the relationship mirroring the decay of East Germany, the way that the entire culture of it gets swapped out, in a matter of weeks in 1989, for the consumerism of the West; the way that the smooth, placid surface of life hides informing and the relentless scrutiny of everybody by everybody else.
I was a bit in awe of that book. It seemed to be tougher and flintier than anything that it was possible to produce from a Western country, and it had as well an unapologetically high-brow sensibility that seemed to revive a continuity stretching back to writers like Thomas Mann and to balmier days for haute culture.
But, unfortunately, that’s not really what Kairos is. There are a few possible theories for why Kairos loses its shape, why it collapses into broad generalities and into some very lazy, historical-themed writing —like a diorama in a history museum.
One theory is that it’s very lightly fictionalized memoir, that Erpenbeck is describing some youthful affair she had and got into the unfortunate zone where she’s sketching away at memories that meant a great deal to her but can’t really be transmitted to anyone else. It doesn’t come through at all, for instance, what she found so attractive about Hans — and the sense is that the actual dynamics of their relationship are completely lost to memory, that what she’s able to provide is only the outline.
Another theory is that there’s something cold and hopelessly remote in Erpenbeck’s sensibility. The feeling, throughout Kairos, is of attending some very severe art installation. There are all these portentous lines — “Everything’s just papier-mâché facade and there’s nothing behind it”; “Hell is now a stable structure based on four sturdy pillars”; “Suddenly time is a steel corset” — but they seem completely out of proportion to the slight fading of attraction between Katharina and Hans, to their quotidian and far-from-terrible lives. And Erpenbeck has a tendency never to give us the actual flesh-and-blood of what Hans and Katharina are like and how they spend time together, but instead, like in a movie with moody shots and a classical soundtrack, to instead try to achieve her effects through an assortment of ancillary details. So when Hans — seemingly out of nowhere — puts a pause in their relationship, we don’t see either of their faces or hear their inner monologues or get the chain of events that led to Hans’ decision. Instead, at this pivotal moment, we get: “The train is in Frankfurt for ten minutes, during which time the locomotive is uncoupled at the front, and another locomotive is coupled at the back, and then suddenly front is back and back is front, and the train, whose final destination was Frankfurt an Der Oder, because the Oder marks the border to Poland, sets off back to Berlin.”
Another theory is that the underlying problem is simple pretentiousness. This comes through most of all in the sections dealing with Hans’ writing career. Hans seems not really to care very much about writing — we have no sense actually of what is in any of his fiction. Being a writer here is an attribute, just a status marker. It’s what makes Katharina attracted to him — that and the fact that people she encounters seem invariably to have read his books. And his status as a writer gives Erpenbeck the opportunity for some choice name-dropping. It turns out that Hans is friends with Christa Wolf! There’s a mention of the fact that “Heiner is coming to dinner,” only to clarify that Heiner is Heiner Muller! So what we’re left with is two not very remarkable people — Hans seems just to be a careerist; the culmination of Katharina’s character arc is that after the Wall comes down she turns into a congenital shoplifter — who don’t seem to enjoy each other’s company very much, but are united through a shared snobbishness, a certain ability to name-check and to listen moodily to classical music.
Well. Oh well. In the end, a great deal of what’s annoying about present-day Europe seems to be distilled in Kairos — the self-seriousness, the reverence for class markers, the tendency to immediately amberify all artwork. But somewhere beneath that is another, more intriguing novel — in which a love affair takes on a life completely of its own, outside of history and social relations, in which the participants of the affair share a language of aesthetics and of associations that is comprehensible only to them.
Heard about Martyr! on the radio the other day. Sounds like something I would like.