In “Distress Tolerance,” an essay that Kaveh Akbar wrote a few years ago for my former publication Gay Magazine, he tells the story of a drunken bike accident that left him with a broken hip, something he didn’t realize until the following day. That incident, wrote Abkbar, was not the moment that turned him toward sobriety. It took several more years before he managed to get help, and now, a few years deep into recovery, he acknowledges the “profound strangeness” of withholding alcohol from himself but also the visceral understanding of how alcohol can take over the body and distort reality: “The more you drink, the more you become defined by the drink, the more you look like a drink and smell like a drink and behave like a drink,” he wrote. The accident also illuminates how alcohol can raise a person’s tolerance of distress and trick them into accepting a higher measure of discomfort and pain: “Alcoholics and addicts, whose lives are often spent lurching from one painful crisis to another, tend to display distress tolerances that are significantly higher than those of their sober peers,” he wrote.
Martyr!, Akbar’s debut novel, picks up Akbar’s thread of addiction, distress tolerance, and distorted reality: the novel opens with Cyrus, an Iranian American poet, lying “on a mattress that smelled like piss and Febreze” and willing God to make the lightbulb in his room flicker, to manifest a sign that he should start over again. And while the sign Cyrus is looking for doesn’t manifest exactly as he wants, he starts over still: the book jumps forward to two years later where Cyrus is in recovery, searching for emotional resonance and for something that makes sense of life and of suffering, but also hesitant to buy into common tropes about recovery and identity that seem to be adopted by so many around him.
Cyrus’s decision to get help is an echo of Akbar’s own; he writes that he had “a dozen reasonable bottoms” before finally calmly driving himself to help. Cyrus, too, decides to become a writer, and by doing so comes to a realization also delivered elegantly by Akbar’s larger body of work: “Active addiction is an algorithm, a crushing sameness,” Cyrus writes. “The story is what comes after.” Cyrus opts for “a book of elegies” for people he’s never met, a text where he can continue his search for meaning. Told from Cyrus’s conflicted, vulnerable, and often irascible perspective and interweaving the stories of the friends, family, artists, and other characters who have had an impact on Cyrus’s life, Akbar’s debut is an exploration of martyrdom and the reasons we find to stay alive.
Martyr!, the first novel by an already accomplished poet, is a dark, beautiful existential comedy, and I’m looking forward to discussing it with you over the next few weeks.
I’m enjoying this book so much, as it’s continues to surprise me over and over again. Also I’ve highlighted so many parts that I want to come back to, that I’m basically going to have to read it all over again as soon as I finish 😂
Hello! I am wondering if there is a recording of the final Zoom? I understand if there isn’t but just thought I’d ask. Thanks!