Martyr! v. Rejection
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 11 • OPENING ROUND
Martyr!
v. Rejection
Judged by Jean Chen Ho
Jean Chen Ho is the author of Fiona and Jane, one of Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022, longlisted for the Story Prize, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Vulture, Vogue, Oprah Daily, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, and Electric Literature. Her fiction, essays, and criticism appear in the New York Times Magazine, the Cut, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Ho is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Chapman University. She lives in Los Angeles. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “Percival Everett and Danzy Senna were former profs of mine at USC.” / jean-chen-ho.com
Both of these books—Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a novel and Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection is a linked story collection—are about the pain of loneliness, one might say. Melancholy. Ennui. Depression. Suicidal ideation. Death and grieving. The existential crisis of being alive in the 21st century, and the longing for human connection when one is deeply aware of its near impossibility, because… well: racism, classism, the internet, horniness in general (what is a normal amount of it?) and sexual attraction specifically to white people (what is a normal amount of it?), self-pity, self-aggrandizement, self-delusion, the inadequacy and mystery and beauty of language, and the fact that a member of your immediate family (as it turns out) is a world-class genius/pathological liar. (Remember I said “both of these books,” so this isn’t a spoiler, OK?)
The main character of Martyr!, Cyrus Shams—handsome lad, sweet, a broke-ass poet—is in his twenties, living in Indiana. He’s an orphan. The single father who raised him died when Cyrus was in college, and his mother died when Cyrus was just a baby—she was one of the 290 victims on Iran Air Flight 655, a passenger plane mistakenly shot down by the US Navy in 1988. He hasn’t been doing much writing lately, though he’s got an idea for a book about martyrs. Staying sober is his main thing right now, and hanging out with his best friend/roommate/occasional lover Zee. Cyrus doesn’t have much use for money, but he’s got a gig at the local hospital as a medical actor. He receives a card with a character to play—age, occupation, pain level—so that med students can practice having difficult bedside conversations. It’s a canny allusion to the conversations he’ll have with Orkideh, the Iranian-American performance artist he’ll journey to visit at the Brooklyn Museum, on a whim, for the martyrs project. She’s dying of cancer, for real. Cyrus only wants to die (we learn this in one of his medical performances, when he supplies the imaginary patient with his own suicide attempt)—and he wants the death to mean something.
Every character in Martyr! thinks like a poet and often speaks like one. By that I mean every character has a poet’s keen sense of observation and a poet’s expansive compassion for the world and the imperfect people in it. And yes, there are poems interspersed throughout the book, written by Cyrus, detritus from his work-in-progress. They’re lovely, as are the dream sequences in which Cyrus’s unconscious mind creates surrealist pairings in conversation, often to comic effect: his mother and Lisa Simpson; his father and Rumi; Orkideh and Donald Trump. But the presence of poetic logic in the book is most striking when an ordinary person, like the character Arash, for example, says something like this:
I have heard people say smell is the sense most attached to memory, but for me it is always language, if language can be thought of as a sense, which of course it can be… It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn’t come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one man is called Iraqi and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an officer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire.
And you believe it, right? That of course a combat veteran (who happens to be Cyrus’s uncle), a man whose job it was to ride on his horse throughout the wasted battlefield of the dead and dying with a flashlight held under his face to suggest the sudden miraculous appearance of an archangel galloping on the wind, the last thing a dying soldier may see before he meets his maker, could contemplate language so carefully, with such clarity and grace.
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In some ways Tulathimutte is a more skillful writer than Akbar: precise sentences that pinpoint some awkward feeling you didn’t know could be so exactly named; a commitment to concept and form in each story that requires, it seems to me, an extremely dogged will of vision married to dexterous execution. I loved this book, and I fucking hated every character in it. They’re pathetic narcissistic assholes, each and every one, but I guess I was supposed to hate them. There’s the performatively woke white dude incel in the first story, “The Feminist,” and his femcel counterpart in “Pics,” Alison, a masochistic white girl who builds her entire life around stalking a former male best friend. (He’s an asshole too, as are all of Alison’s female friends, and also the raven she adopts, Pootie.) There’s the late-blooming Kant who wants to sexually dominate and degrade his boyfriend but can’t help getting in his own way, as when “getting called Daddy distracts him into wondering why his son would be white.” There’s Kant’s extremely online agender sibling Bee, who joins a co-op in college and immediately filibusters the house meeting about gender identity, pronouns, and Asian American identity, then goes on to—I can’t even describe Bee’s other asshole antics, you just have to read the book.
I truly admired the dazzling audacity of Rejection to thoroughly and relentlessly inspire disgust in me. Citing Kant’s (Immanuel [1724–1804], that is, not the Thai American protagonist in Rejection’s “Ahegao”) Critique of Judgment, the affect theorist Sianne Ngai argues that disgust is “the single exception to representational art’s otherwise unlimited power to beautify things which are ugly or displeasing in real life… a negation of beauty… the disgusting is the ‘true Kantian sublime’—more sublime than the sublime itself.” And by the end of Rejection, one does reach a state of sublimity, having experienced all of these disgusting people in their disgusting lives, saying disgusting things to one another and moreso to themselves.
In Portraits, John Berger wrote: “Rembrandt represents the dark suffering of genius. We all become forgiving about those who have misunderstood us, when we think of Rembrandt. Thus we force art to console us, and repay it by calling it beautiful.” This sentiment may well apply to Akbar’s Martyr!, in which characters often misunderstand one another—because of language and performance, alcohol and drugs, war’s ravages on the brain and heart, the passage of time—and yet they still speak, they offer themselves to one another. And about Bruegel, Berger wrote: “Bruegel collected the evidence for a prosecution which he had no sure reason for believing would ever be mounted. The charge he wanted brought was that of indifference.” This is Tulathimutte’s Rejection, which forces you to look directly at abjection and loneliness without making it a pretty picture, no chance of redemption. This book is an indictment dressed up in satire’s stiff taffeta gown.
So the question may be: When reading a novel, what do you want? Beauty or disgust? Which path to the sublime? No wrong answers here, as I always say when I teach creative writing, only dishonest ones. This wasn’t a hard choice for me.
Advancing:
Martyr!
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: If I may be permitted a rant, John: My least favorite word that is used frequently by good writers is nondescript. No one ever uses “nondescript” in conversation, which makes it a bullshit writerly word and that’s reason enough never to type it. But more than that, it is a writer’s job to describe things. Do not tell me something is not capable of being described, or worse, not worthy of being described.
Nondescript is, by my unofficial count, used most often to modify the words sedan and suit. I have never seen a sedan or suit so ordinary that I could not use words in order to differentiate them from other sedans and suits, and especially, in the case of fiction writers, sedans and suits that the author is inventing in their own head. Either describe the thing you have just made up or don’t describe it, but never tell me you can’t be bothered.
Kaveh Akbar is excellent with words, as you can see in both his prose and his poetry. So I was disappointed when I encountered “nondescript” early in Martyr! He used it in a way that was kind of pejorative, however, so I considered it part of the authorial point of view and allowed it. But then he used it two more times, in ways that specifically meant I don’t feel like describing this thing. I’m sure it’s just an authorial tic. We all have them, and it’s possible Akbar doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Nevertheless, you know how on Chopped one of the chefs sometimes leaves out a basket ingredient? It’s not an automatic disqualification, but somebody else has to make something pretty much inedible to save you. That’s sort of the way I feel about using nondescript three times in one novel.
John Warner: It’s funny to think about these seemingly small, yet big-to-ourselves, disqualifying things. I’m increasingly bugged by prologues that tease some event that won’t be explained until much deeper in the book, and am wary about continuing reading if I see that particular move at the outset. Leave that stuff for my favorite trash TV like The Night Agent.
Kevin: Aside from my own (intensely personal) pedantry, I really enjoyed Martyr! Its theme is perhaps the most important thing in the world, as this concept of secular martyrdom—of dying a meaningful death—is really about what it is to live a meaningful life. As Cyrus says, “I want my having been alive to matter.” To that end, I thought the idea of writing poems as tributes to the world’s secular martyrs was both clever and beautifully done.
In the small town where I grew up there was this older guy named Art, and he used to write poems about famous people—presidents and actors—but also just about ordinary people who lived in the town. He wrote two poems about my brother, because my brother was an excellent high school athlete. They weren’t good poems. An English teacher once told him he wrote in “iambic pentameter” and Art used to tell people, “Ain’t nobody else in the whole county can do that!” When that same brother got married, I asked Art to write a poem I could read at his wedding. He had never met the bride, but the only two things he wanted to know about her were her date of birth, and height and weight. Art knew a lot of words that rhymed with numbers.
But not everybody gets a poem written about them, much less three. A poem is a special and meaningful gift, in iambic pentameter or not.
John: You’ve reminded me of legendary Chicago music scene fixture Thax Douglas, who is known for writing largely spontaneous verse about bands that he recites before they go onstage. If I’m not mistaken, there is a verse somewhere about the band I was in, non-legendary indie rockers Quiet Kid. Now that we have ChatGPT, which can spit out (roughly) metrical iambic pentameter at the strike of a return key, I think we’ve got to treasure these public poetry-making eccentrics more. They were never in high number. Now they may disappear altogether.
Kevin: As the owner of a Quiet Kid CD, I would declare them poem-worthy.
John: Judge Ho is impressed by Tulathimutte’s ability to deliver a book she “loved” that is filled with “pathetic narcissistic assholes,” and on this I concur. Coincidentally, early in the first Trump administration, I tried to publish a novel consisting of linked short stories (where the story was continuous) called “Good” White People that was chock with pathetic assholes, an attempt at achieving what Judge Ho calls, “an indictment dressed up in satire’s stiff taffeta gown,” and needless to say I had no luck publishing it. (If anyone at all wants to see it, let me know and I’ll email you a PDF.)
I made a few mistakes with the book. For one, I’m not as talented as Tony Tulathimutte. For two, while the stories were an indictment of the characters, I was still interested in generating some measure of sympathy and the possibility of redemption for (some of) these pathetic assholes because they were products of a society that is biased toward creating pathetic assholes. I wouldn’t say this is pulling punches exactly, but it was a deliberate decision to temper the audience’s disgust, a choice Tulathimutte resists.
The handful of responses I got from editors about my effort suggested they couldn’t imagine an audience for the book, which I couldn’t dispute. I sometimes have a hard time imagining an audience for any book.
The fact that Judge Ho loved Rejection, but did not have a hard time choosing Martyr! to advance suggests that the fascination of spending time with the pathetic assholes, even done as well as possible cannot outdo other artistic intentions.
Kevin: In tomorrow’s match, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino takes on Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations. Meher Manda will do the choosing.
Today’s mascot
Nominated by Catherine, Sadie is a rescued rat terrier who dislikes other dogs and most people.
She does not have a medium setting—only couch potato and “adventure-Sadie.” She loves an outing.
But what she loves the most is when the two people she generally finds tolerable are sitting in the library in Catherine’s house either reading or working on a crossword puzzle.
If asked, she would probably pick the Kelly Link book as her favorite in the ToB because that behemoth kept Catherine in the library the longest. But in their house they stan Percival Everett and Sadie would probably like the adventure aspect of James.
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.)