Martyr! v. Margo’s Got Money Troubles
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 27 • ZOMBIE ROUND
Martyr!
v. Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Judged by Ivy Pochoda
Ivy Pochoda is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Wonder Valley, Visitation Street, These Women, and Sing Her Down, which won the LA Times Book Prize. She won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, among other awards. For 11 years, Ivy has taught creative writing in Los Angeles’s Skid Row. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. She lives in Los Angeles. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / ivypochoda.com
I spent the last eight months judging the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for mystery and thriller—an overwhelming (but delightful) assignment that left no room to read outside that particular genre. This meant that I have had zero engagement with the BIG LITERARY BOOKS of 2024. So, I came into this process cold. I read blind. If there had been hype—well, I missed it.
It is, I realized, an altogether infrequent occurrence—to read something without the discoloration of a review, the hyperbole of a recommendation, or the hard-sell of the editor’s note. It is, I remembered, a total pleasure.
And yet, I worried as I set off to read these books that my brain might have been temporarily rewired by so many thrillers—yeah, yeah, a thriller can be literary. I worried that I’d crave plot and action and intrigue. I worried that I’d crave momentum. (Maybe I worried I’d be a little bored or let down.)
So, here’s a sort of reverse bias. The same way in which literary writers assume thrillers can’t be, you know, literary, thriller writers imagine those big New York Times books must be a slog. And, over the last eight months, this prejudice had seeped into my head. I’m not going to lie.
Well, in the case of Margo’s Got Money Troubles and Martyr!, I was dead wrong. I devoured each of these books at alarming speed, desperate to know how they would end, yet pausing to marvel at the style and flair—not to mention wit and lyricism of the writing.
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I read Margo’s Got Money Troubles on a transatlantic flight. I kept reading in line for passport control and finished the book as I was boarding the airport bus. I was totally in the zone from start to finish. The experience reminded me of those transcendental reading jags during my childhood summers where nothing—and I mean nothing—could snap my reverie. I just needed to know if Margo would be able to keep her baby and how. Margo’s humor and humanity buffeted me from mistake to misadventure. Being dropped into her world felt like crowd surfing—perhaps a little misguided and potentially dangerous. But holy hell, was it fun and at the same time hilarious.
Sure, there were moments that lost me. For the life of me I could not quite understand how stupidly comical TikToks might bolster your OnlyFans engagement. But the point here is that this doesn’t matter—at all. Just because you can’t personally engage with a particular zeitgeist doesn’t make that zeitgeist any less interesting, especially when written about with so much panache. Because any good writing about art (and Margo makes a wonderful and compelling argument that TikTok, OnlyFans, and pro wrestling sure are art) doesn’t need to recreate that art itself so the reader totally gets it—but rather must summon the vibration coming off the art, cause it to course over you instead of beating you on the head with it.
Martyr! is also about art. It’s about poetry. It contains poems. It has dreams. It has Lisa Simpson. And modern warfare. And family. And trauma. And addiction. And at times tiptoes toward magical realism. I could go on. It has nearly everything I tell my MFA students to avoid. And yet—it works lyrically, humorously, and narratively. As I turned the pages—surprisingly fast given the scope and profundity of what they contained—I kept thinking to myself there is no way this book is succeeding on so many fronts, there is just no way. And dammit—if that big juicy coincidence that I predicted halfway through wasn’t so well earned by the end that I wanted to clap. There were times I had to slow myself down, pull myself out of the ecstasy of reading and examine the prose like some kind of magical creature I knew I had to release before I could move on.
It seems unfair that a novel can be so many things all at once while actually, you know, telling a story. Despite the book’s thematic darkness—addiction, death, depression—I was filled with a joyful exuberance as a read. I felt grounded in the plot despite the presence of totally wild narrative risk. And I laughed, so hard and so often.
And now we come to the end, literally. Both these books have rather neat endings, almost euphoric ones. Margo ends with my favorite lines of the whole novel, “Because that’s what art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.” And yet this brilliance comes a moment too late. While I rooted for Margo from start to finish, just previous to this kicker, I sensed the long arm of Hollywood (or readers’ insatiable hunger for redemption) reaching in and guiding the story. Which was a bit of a shame because the sheer joy of Margo is how human and relatable she is, how her mistakes don’t simply endear her to us but make us more forgiving of ourselves. Until the end, Margo is a study in the messiness of life, the necessity of mistakes and the possibility of fortitude in harsh times. So, I didn’t need a nice bow, a pretty package, the promise of a hopeful future. The sheer existence of a character such as Margo herself—her attitude and humor and resilience—gives me hope enough.
Martyr! too closes on a euphoric note, an ecstatic one, one that takes everything that has come before and turns up the volume to one thousand:
The ground was breathing, revealing tiny little golden fissures in the earth as it swelled. The trees dropped their flowers, then their branches to the ground—slowly, almost delicately, like new lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time. The sky had gone from white to gray to bright orange, a great cigarette sucked back to life. There was thunder but no rain. Or maybe not thunder, but great cracking sounds all around.
(This is open to multiple interpretations, which is another credit to the book in the sense that I don’t care about this potential subterfuge.) Any way you read it, the final pages of Martyr! deliver an OTT rendering of a small moment of human connection, that is nonetheless seeped in magic and invention and rendered in dreamlike hyperbole. It doesn’t overpromise a better future or a perfect world—but it does justice and justifies everything that has come before, telescoping the mythological, the historical, and the universal to the personal. It made me gasp and perhaps cry just a little, then turn the book over and stare at the author photo and wonder, once again—how the hell did he just do that.
Advancing:
Martyr!
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Alana Mohamed: Well, hello, Meave! I can’t say I was pulling for one over the other here, but I am fascinated by how Judge Pochoda arrives at her decision. I liked hearing about her experiences reading each of the books. I thought it was interesting that she said she had to slow down when reading Martyr! to examine the language. I wish she would have talked about what worked for her in terms of language, or what it means to execute many things well. I would say I think there are some fronts Martyr! succeeded on more than others.
Meave Gallagher: Our last regular commentary, and here’s Cyrus snatching near-victory from Margo and her baby. Selfish! Did you notice that Judge Pochoda didn’t name any characters in Martyr!? I wonder, when she says author Akbar “telescope[s] the mythological, the historical, and the universal to the personal”—well, whose personal? Personal what? Plenty of authors have tried the same thing and failed; I’d also like to get specifics on how Akbar succeeds at this.
AM: Yeah, I think Judge Pochoda seems impressed by perhaps the structure of the novel and the disparate elements it wove together, but she really zooms out when she’s talking about it. Complete side note but I lol’d at “For the life of me I could not quite understand how stupidly comical TikToks might bolster your OnlyFans engagement.” As someone who (sad trombone) works in marketing, I was like, it’s just a numbers game! Anyway, it’s funny that she mentioned it and I’m glad it didn’t interrupt her “transcendental reading jags.” I feel like you had also mentioned something about going deeper into some aspects of OnlyFans—do you think that kind of detail would have made for a stronger story?
MG: Based on the judgment, I don’t think that would’ve saved Margo’s Got Money Troubles. But, yeah: It’s just using any social media platform to direct people somewhere else. Like, say, using Bluesky or Instagram to drive traffic to Palestinian fundraising campaigns. But there are many criticisms about OF that author Thorpe didn’t address, and as Margo isn’t really about OF, they would’ve spoiled the fairy-tale-ish, heightened realism of the novel. No one reads Margo to learn about how OF exploits and profits from its creators—most sex workers aren’t making a living wage just rating dicks and posting nudes. One reads Margo for the story of a creative and scrappy young woman using her creativity to get out of poverty. If it weren’t so charming and lovely, I’d have to be mad at its bootstrappiness. A heel turn? No, Margo forever.
AM: Judge Pochoda says she “sensed the long arm of Hollywood (or readers’ insatiable hunger for redemption) reaching in and guiding the story” in Margo. Isn’t there some of that redemption present in Martyr! as well? It seems like the strangeness of Martyr!’s ending separates it from Margo, which Judge Pochoda seems to think ended too neatly. I wonder about the use of “neatly” here as it relates to Hollywood guiding the story—Margo’s business venture ties the story up, but also seems like an emotionally fraught solution (paving the way for a sequel?). It’s ambiguous what’s actually happening in Martyr! but it seems like there’s some sort of emotional clarity reached. Both end “neatly” in different ways—which one packs the bigger punch?
MG: Is Martyr!’s ending ambiguous? Because if author Akbar meant us to think, “Ooh what if Cyrus just died right there?” Or “What if he’s been dead? What if he martyred himself for love?”—I will defenestrate myself. I read it as an exceptionally florid description of all the emotions Cyrus was experiencing simultaneously.
AM: Exceptionally florid! Sick burn. (I don’t think it’s ambiguous that he’s alive fwiw.)
MG: Poets is as poets does. As for Margo, while I didn’t feel like author Thorpe was thinking of the limited series that I’m surprised I haven’t read about it being optioned for yet, I can see it being adapted pretty easily: Elle Fanning read Margo, now she plays Margo! (Unless 27 is too old to play 20—I don’t know who the young adults of Hollywood are anymore.) Tricia Helfer or Kaitlin Olson as Margo’s mom? Steven Ogg, a character actor my husband thinks would be perfect for Jinx?
But to answer your question: I don’t think either had a real blam! of an ending. Not like falling off the roof of a derelict airport, or preparing yourself to shuffle off this mortal coil while weeping on the Staten Island Ferry. Those endings walloped me like a cartoon hammer. I think Thorpe and Akbar liked their protagonists too much to not give them happy endings.
AM: I would agree with that. I think of the two, I find Martyr!’s ending more satisfying.
MG: I did want to make one more observation about Martyr! before we wrap up, and that’s about this bit at the end: “‘But nobody’s neglected you, Cyrus. You see that now, don’t you?’ ‘I think I am starting to, yeah,’ Cyrus answered.” It made me laugh, one big, cynical ha! right from the diaphragm. Cyrus is just so stuck on and in Cyrus, he has to endure an entire book before realizing he’s not the alonest, saddest boy who ever lived.
AM: I think I have a lot more sympathy for Martyr!, but I see how it’s got its specific audience. I do think that of our protagonists, Margo is much more winsome than mopey Cyrus. I sympathize with your frustration—I feel like I’m enabling man-babies everywhere by saying that I was moved by his journey.
MG: To be perfectly frank, I think if I’d read Martyr! three springs ago, I might’ve had more empathy for Cyrus, but I am… not the same person I was in early 2022. So Martyr! rides black-cloaked into the final, and we say goodbye to Margo.
Got any reading lined up for 2025 yet? We’re reading 2024’s Cahokia Jazz—speaking of mystery as literature—in book club as I write this, and next up is Erika Swyler’s We Lived on the Horizon—the “I like my sci-fi to explain the science!” one of us picked it. I’m also planning on yelling my way through Margaret MacMillan’s Paris 1919 and Scott Anderson’s Lawrence in Arabia. This year also brings new work from Margaret Killjoy, Marcia Rendon, and Tamsyn Muir, whose fourth Locked Tomb novel, Alecto the Ninth, just showed up in one of my libraries’ catalogs in a “coming up” capacity. That was an instant ALERT ME on Libby.
AM: Important to keep an eye on your local library’s catalog! My library has a book club with WNYC that features a bunch of hot titles—right now we’re reading Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett. I might pick up Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s The Creation of Half Broken People, or Noor Al-Sibai’s MySpace Scene Queens. Other than that, I’m slacking on my fiction game! I’m looking forward to Garrett Felber’s A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre and Marcus Alexander Gadson’s Sedition: How America’s Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis.
MG: I’m adding A Continuous Struggle to my list right now. It has, as ever, been a delight to commentate with you. I wish you a very peaceful Ramadan, and that you get what you need from it.
AM: Thanks, Meave! Same here—let’s see what comes of the final!