Martyr! v. Beautyland
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 20 • QUARTERFINALS
Martyr!
v. Beautyland
Judged by Kelly McEvers
Kelly McEvers is a two-time Peabody Award-winning journalist and former host of NPR's flagship newsmagazine, All Things Considered. She spent many years working as an international correspondent, reporting from Asia, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. She is the creator and host of the acclaimed Embedded podcast, a documentary show that goes to hard places to make sense of the news. She has contributed to This American Life, the BBC, Marketplace, and The World. Her writing has appeared in Wired, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and Slate. She began her career at the Chicago Tribune. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / Kelly McEvers @ NPR
When I tell people I’m a radio person and, more recently, a podcast person, they assume that means I just say things, that words simply fall out of my mouth unrehearsed, like they do in the zillions of man-pods out there. Or, if it’s a more scripted product, that the words were formed in some magical word cloud in the sky that then wafts into their ears.
Don’t worry, I’m not tryna crowd this space with all my gripes about the sorry state of podcasting, the sexism, or the fact that people underappreciate my craft, blah blah blah. Instead, I guess I just want to talk about what making things out of words over the years has taught me about my taste, which hopefully then will justify the painful decision I made in choosing one of the two lovely books I was assigned to read for this contest: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino and Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar.
If you’ve been reading and watching all the Saturday Night Live retrospectives, you have learned that very little of that show is improvised, that unlike any good Second City or Upright Citizens Brigade improv skit, a really good sketch on SNL has been scripted, scripted, and scripted again.
In other words, it’s all about the writing. And, I learned, it’s all about writing that does one very simple thing: surprises us. It’s an insanely simple metric, one that I find I now apply to almost everything I consume. It’s why clichés suck so bad. It’s why true crime is the last thing on Earth I want to read or hear. And don’t tell anyone, but it’s why I find some forms of investigative journalism to be a tough sell. Corporate malfeasance! Bad actors! We know where the story is going.
I should be clear here and say that I have blatantly stolen this metric from other people in my biz, namely the gang at This American Life. Whenever we—and I say we like I’m in the club, even though I’m only kind of in the club—are presented with a pitch, a piece of tape, a turn in a story, there is one question that prevails, and that is, is it surprising? Does it make you sit up in your chair a little? Is it the thing or person, or decision, or moment that you least expected?
The metric, of course, is flawed. You can be totally wowed by a piece of tape, but then the story itself doesn’t land. You can be blown away by the fact-pattern of someone’s experience, but that person ends up being a flat and bland talker (the degree to which someone is a good or bad talker is how we radio people decide basically everything).
I recently read a novel with some of the most astounding writing I had ever seen. Every single paragraph had these sublime lines I am positive I had never read before and will never read again. Sentences that made me yell at objects, throw the book down, look out the window as if someone was gonna look back at me and say, “I know, right?”
But, the book didn’t hold up. As a book. At any given moment, I just didn’t know where I was or where I was going, or why. It lacked that propulsive thing that I think good stories need. Which in my case I suppose means a story that surprisingly propulses me forward. Haha.
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So what I’m saying is, there’s more to this way of measuring things. But it’s a starting point. Like, if I’m not surprised, that’s a deal breaker. You know that feeling when you’re watching a TV show, and you can figure out six of the story’s next chess moves? That’s how I don’t want to feel, ever.
The good news is, the main characters in Beautyland and Martyr! are super surprising! From the moment I met each of them, I thought, wow, what weird and wonderful people. I’m in. Sadly, though, one character didn’t have surprising insights, and the other did. And that, on the surprise-o-meter, means one was the clear winner for me.
In Beautyland, a girl who becomes a woman believes she was sent to Earth by aliens to report back on what she observes. I know that doesn’t sound surprising, but the way the premise is executed over time is clever, and it definitely kept me reading. In Martyr!, a guy who believes his Iranian mother died when a US aircraft carrier shot down her plane (a real thing that happened in 1988) is trying to write a book about “making death useful” while staying sober and figuring out whether his roommate is his friend or his lover. All pretty surprising facts from the jump.
These two characters are people I would love to spend time with. Adina, in Beautyland, definitely does lots of unconventional things—because she’s actually an alien or because of something else. Not knowing which one it is is really fun, and it’s what drives the book. I’m being propulsed, I’m being surprised. Check.
The problem is, Adina’s insights about us humans aren’t that insightful. At one point, she observes vendors who run halal meat carts in New York City: “The vendors spend the day fulfilling the lunch request of the city’s workings. Then, at 7:30 pm… the vendors drag their carts back down the alley…”
If I were the alien overlords, I’m not sure I would want to read that report. And unfortunately, that’s true in most of the book, save for a couple of lovely exceptions.
In Martyr!, the plot does take a slightly corny and foreseeable turn at one point, but aside from that, I was constantly surprised. By the quick and sharp voice of the main character, Cyrus. By his thoughts on the meaning of art and writing. By the fragments of the book-within-a-book Cyrus is writing in real time. By the way the story toggled between present-ish day Indiana and New York City to Iran in the 1980s—and by some simply wacky dream sequences that imagine Cyrus in conversation with people like Lisa Simpson, Donald Trump, and Rumi.
On every few pages is a paragraph that I would read twice, and, what’s even better, those paragraphs hold together as a larger thing. This book is not something I could have ever imagined, and that makes me so happy. It’s why I chose Martyr! to advance in this contest.
At one point, Cyrus is working as a medical actor at a hospital, for cash. One day he’s with a med student, and he breaks character to tell her about a time when he tried to set himself on fire in a bathtub. He asks her if she, too, has an organ at the base of her throat, “a doom organ” that “pulses dread… like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you.” By the end of the chapter, the med student has coaxed Cyrus back into character—a Mrs. Kaufmann—and they resume talk about her imaginary tumors.
Advancing:
Martyr!
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: When we discussed Martyr! In the opening round, John, I went on a rant about my intense, perhaps unreasonable dislike for the word nondescript, which Kaveh Akbar uses with some frequency in that novel. Well, you know who else loves the word nondescript? Marie-Helene Bertino! In fact she uses it twice in a span of four pages to not describe two different rooms in the same office. Grrr.
But we all learn to ignore the faults in those we love, and I really loved Beautyland. It completely charmed me, even if I have absolutely no idea what its offices look like.
John Warner: Describing offices as “nondescript” strikes me as something of a broader cultural comment on our expectation of offices as generic, soulless spaces, but I do think it’s a mistake to see those spaces as nondescript. Those of us watching Severance see that the specifics of nondescriptiveness matter quite a lot to the experience of that setting and the atmosphere of the moment.
Kevin: Exactly! You get me, John.
Martyr! is an excellent novel, and writing one is hard. Ninety percent of all literary criticism is picking at nits. I find no fault in the reasoning by Judge McEvers (whom I have enjoyed listening to on NPR for a very long time), but I would have chosen the other way. The why involves spoilers, so I’m going to try to explain carefully.
As Judge McEvers points out, there is a twist in Martyr! that I saw coming 100 pages ahead of time. That itself is not the problem. Any good twist should be guessable by some percentage of readers. It can’t just come out of nowhere. The problem is that the coincidence is so improbable that when it first occurred to me I said to myself, “There’s no way he’s going to do that.”
I am very forgiving of coincidences in novels. Most good stories are about coincidences, like the time I ran into my college roommate the Fetus, 10 years after graduation, at the rental car return in the Albany airport. Billion-to-one coincidences happen every day. But the coincidence should be the reason you’re telling the story. If I didn’t see the Fetus that day I would never tell you or anybody else I once returned a rental car in Albany. This isn’t the way Akbar uses the incident. And it wouldn’t have been that hard for him to put it in an acceptable context, but he doesn’t.
John: You could argue that good storytelling makes coincidences both plausible and meaningful, which is why you haven’t written the great “Seeing the Fetus 10 Years After Graduation at the Rental Car Return in the Albany Airport” novel. I mean, I’m not saying you couldn’t do it, but the odds aren’t great.
For me, it’s really a matter of how visible the author’s puppet strings remain. All novels are manipulations one way or another, so we can’t blame a writer for moving us around at their discretion, but I think we—OK, I—get a little sulky when it feels like a line has been crossed.
Kevin: Richard Ford could write a great novel about running into the Fetus at the Albany airport, I’m just saying.
The end of Beautyland, by contrast, is so sublime that I was completely smitten, exactly on the final page. I don’t want to tempt anyone to look ahead; it won’t make sense until you’ve read the whole novel anyway. But the last two sentences recontextualize every other sentence that came before them in a way that I am still contemplating.
There are no doubt readers who saw it coming. I didn’t and it blew me away.
Peeking in at the Zombie results, Beautyland has all the spaceballs it needs to become our intergalactic incorporeality. If the Zombie Round were held today, All Fours and Beautyland would be our Brides of the Underworld.
Tomorrow we have The History of Sound by Ben Shattuck meeting the Matryoshka doll of real-life and fictional translators and authors that is The Extinction of Irena Rey, with real-life translator Nicholas Glastonbury making the call.
Also, I keep typing “The Extinction of Lana Del Rey,” who actually played the Glastonbury Festival last year. I’m so fucking confused. Very glad Meave and Alana have the commentary on that one.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Elizabeth, Frankie is a Cavoodle from Perth, Western Australia. She lives with her two loyal servants, who are both English teachers, and enjoys settling on the couch for a snooze while they read.
Frankie also loves her daily walk, the library loop, which goes past her local library and a little free library as well. She would like to shout-out Margo’s Got Money Troubles, but probably wouldn’t sell pics of her paws on the internet.
If you’re interested in nominating a pet as a mascot for this year’s Tournament of Books, contact us for more details. (Please note, this is a paid program.)