“Martyr!” by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf)
Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong books (if autofiction is dead, why won’t it die?) but I’ve never been more blindsided by a surprise twist. Those more astute to plot-driven narrative might bemoan they ‘saw it coming from a mile away,’ but I received Akbar’s big reveal with such a thrill, I tore through the denouement before shedding a tear. Those came later though, as I’ve continued to marvel at this debut novel; a hero’s journey that squares off with recovery (from trauma and substance abuse) and identity (generational, racial, sexual: queerness) in an inspiring about-face, full of artful searching and philosophical probing, amid tragedy and many a keen observational turn of phrase; Akbar is already an admired poet after all.
Through nonlinear and shifting perspectives, variously told in the first and third person, Akbar weaves a tapestry surrounding Iran Air Flight 655, the scheduled passenger plane which the U.S. military erroneously shot down over Iran’s territorial waters on April 3, 1988, wherein all 290 civilian passengers were killed. Despite this specificity—fact check: it really happened—the politics of the novel are age-old. The senseless act spurs Akbar’s characters to grapple with purpose in a modern life too often bereft of meaning and personal freedom. Imaginative form abounds through dreamt dialogue among “personal heroes and beloveds” from its main character’s youth, for results like: Lisa Simpson in conversation with their departed mother; and a book-in-progress within the book itself, featuring elegies of historic martyrs like Bobby Sands, Hypathia of Alexandria and Qu Yuan, along with its own fictional characters. “Martyr!” is an immersive and erudite novel before, and long after, its twist and turns.
“Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable” by Sarah Gerard (Zando)
In 2016, at an apartment in Ridgewood Queens, 25-year-old poet Carolyn Bush was murdered by her roommate, who promptly confessed to the stabbing. It would take four more years to reach a verdict, during which time the assailant would mount an unusual defense and plead weed, or marijuana-induced psychosis—if we’re being clinical. Meanwhile, author Sarah Gerard, a friend of Bush’s, is compelled to tell her story. The result is a nonfiction book that avoids the trappings of true crime as a potentially exploitative genre.
“I read many books about murder when I started writing this one,” Gerard notes. “I hadn’t previously read any in the genre known as ‘true crime,’ and I still don’t read many books about murderers, though I’ve enjoyed some about their victims.” The result is a diligently reported work that, while covering the full scope of this crime, truly portrays and pays tribute to its victim, variously known as Carrie and Carolyn and Coco by her many friends and family members. They’re given the most voice here, both to honor their loved one—as they knew her throughout the various stages of her too-short life—but also as observers of a suspect and confounding criminal justice system. The effect is reminiscent of oral histories in the Studs Terkel or Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain vein. But Gerard’s narrative is an anchor for readers faced with all the unknowables that obscure a violent crime. The final result is as much about Gerard’s all-consuming experience reporting the thing, as it is about the young woman who can no longer chime in.
“All Fours” by Miranda July (Riverhead Books)
If the 21st century’s greatest living writer, George Saunders, blurbs a book as “a giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force,” it must be true. I found the exposition of this first-person narrative about a famed multi-disciplinary artist (written by a famed multi-disciplinary artist) on a debauched road trip so inventive and dazzling that I lost the plot for the remaining three-quarters of the novel, which says a lot considering just how much of what could be characterized as a giddy, bold, mind-blowing tour de force—sexiness, followed. For me, July is at her best on the page when characters are speaking, and her dialogue remains incisive and propulsive in “All Fours,” if in short supply. Instead, these exchanges are couched in long passages of introspection and the often spiraling interiority of its narrator, whose state of crisis and subsequent crises are, in all fairness, the arc of this boulder. Readers will be hard pressed to find a book this year that so lovingly portrays traumatic childbirth, perimenopause, interior design and contemporary dance in the context of a series of steamy trysts, within an even larger coming-of-middle-age story.
“The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown” by Nina Sharma (Penguin Press)
This timely memoir, told in personal essays, captures a large and sweeping swath of the American experience considering its rooted in one woman’s life story. Steeped in pop culture—a barrage of familiar music, film, TV and literature—as well as historic touchstones from the last four decades, a vivid portrait of the author emerges by associations she’s set out to reexamine. Through her multimedia mining, Sharma explores her own experience as a second generation South Asian American immigrant, on the other side of a bipolar diagnosis, navigating a biracial relationship in the great love story of her life, with her soon-to-be husband, who is a Black. Readers will be familiar with many or most of the references from the world of entertainment, be it the Grateful Dead, “Evil Dead 2” or “The Walking Dead”; along with historic events which span from the Lovings v. Virginia to Tipper Gore v. everything cool, Rodney King to George Floyd, and the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes amid political rhetoric during the COVID-19 pandemic. Others were totally new to me, such as Vincent Chin, whose murder in 1982 (a year before I was born) spurred a newly solidified Pan Asian American community to organize in protest of that hate crime; first in Detroit, and later as a catalyst for awareness and solidarity throughout the country. From headlines to frontlines, Sharma’s often fraught relationship with her parents—who are assimilated, upper class, relatively conservative immigrants—is as compelling a case study of racial tolerance and its resulting nuanced challenges as any. To the reader’s benefit, their dynamic is broadly relatable and rendered with lacerating wit and compassion reserved for kin. I can only imagine how much of a drag it’d be if my parents, like hers, were members of Trump’s New Jersey country club. Then, in light of recent events, the final essay, “We Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny That Kamala Harris Is Our Time-Traveling Daughter” is perfect and prescient-seeming, in a book that reveals itself best by Sharma’s making sense of the whole chaotic mess of things as they come.
“Anyone’s Ghost” by August Thompson (Penguin Press)
It’s no spoiler when, in the opening line, our narrator Theron David Alden introduces three car crashes and that Jake, his subject of elegiac interest, is dead. The first half of the novel promptly looks back at the formation of their influential, sufficiently complicated, adolescent relationship during one fateful summer break in the sleepy New Hampshire town of New Hampton. There, they share a dubious summer job working together, otherwise unsupervised, at a local hardware store, where they bond over music. Careful, at first, not to venture too far from the Big Four and other heavy metal bands, gradually they branch out to reveal more of their CD collections vis-à-vis themselves. As they delve deeper into their Case Logics, they reveal guilty pleasures hidden behind youthful self-doubt. Brimming with this brand of nostalgia, the novel couldn’t embody and imbue a more summer vibe. Idle hours, onanism and lust, underage drinking and recreational drug use, and a foray into victimless crime are all in play. It’s a miracle nobody gets hurt sooner. Years later, the pair reconnect to find their dynamic upended and the greater implications of their relationship exposed. Thompson’s debut is vivid despite grappling with all the intangibles endemic to coming-of-age and the resulting newfound personhood we’re left with.
