Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. All day today, we've been talking about some of the buzziest and most interesting debut novels. In his novel Martyr!, acclaimed poet Kaveh Akbar tells the story of a young Iranian American poet named Cyrus who wants to become a martyr. Why? Well, it started partially from how his mother was killed when he was a baby. The commercial flight she was on was downed by the American Navy. His father brought Cyrus to the US where his dad spent his years working on a chicken farm and drinking gin. He died when Cyrus was in college. Now struggling with his writing and his tenuous sobriety, Cyrus has decided that maybe dying is easier than living, but only if his death means something.

He's decided to compile a book of martyrs, poems and musings about people who have given up their lives for the cause. When he's done, Cyrus might end his life too. Then he hears about an Iranian artist using her own impending death in her practice. She has decided to spend the final days of her life sitting and talking with people at the Brooklyn Museum. Cyrus thinks an interview with her would be a great addition to his book. But the more time he spends with the artist, the more his ideas about life and death are challenged.

Martyr! was a finalist for the National Book Award and was just released in paperback. When he joined us on the show on Pub Day, I started by asking Akbar, who had already been an accomplished poet, whether he had always wanted to write a novel.

Kaveh Akbar: I always wanted to be a writer, and I assumed that that meant that I would be living life in tuberculine, squalor and working a terrible day job and smoking cigarettes and hacking away at the typewriter at night. That was what I thought writers were. I was fine with that. I was great with that. Whatever it took to get to spend a life as a writer, that's what I would do.

Alison Stewart: In terms of writing a novel, what from your practice as a poet was useful? What was not?

Kaveh Akbar: It felt very normal to me, very organic to have interesting characters say wise oracular things to each other in gnomic and interesting ways. What did not feel natural was getting people through doorways and onto airplanes and explaining how people got money to buy their plane tickets and who picks up the coffee tab and these sorts of things. For that, I did an intensive narrative study. I was reading two novels a week and watching a movie a day. Just ivy drip, foie gras ducking narrative into myself, just trying to consume everything that I could in this absolutely kleptomaniacal way, just seeing how other people did these things, how people form narratives out of images, and then applying that to this story that I wanted to tell.

Alison Stewart: What do you understand about narrative that you didn't understand before?

Kaveh Akbar: Wow, that's such a big and generous question. Everything. The intricacy of it. The way that if you make what feels like a minor shift on page 7, then it creates this architectonic crack in the fundament that alters everything on page 123 and everything on page 279. These reverberations are so mammoth in a way that doesn't really have a direct correlative in lyric poetry.

Alison Stewart: One of a catalyzing event in this is based on a true story-- on a real story, I should say, about the US Navy downing an Iranian plane in the late '80s. Was this always part of the story? The mother has to die? Was it always going to be this way?

Kaveh Akbar: Well, I was interested in writing about this plane incident. In 1988, the US Naval warship, the USS Vincennes, shot an Iranian civilian airliner out of the sky, killing all 290 people on board, including 66 children. It's an event that we don't really talk about, we don't really know about here, but in Iran, they put it on postage stamps. They really, really commemorate and propagandize this event and it's completely unknown here. I wanted to tell this story. When it happened, then Vice President George H. W. Bush, said, "I don't care what the facts are. I'm not going to apologize for America" sort of person.

Just these really, really, really chilling moments where 290 civilians were just shot out of the sky. It was a civilian airliner doing nothing and they were just shot out of the sky by mistake. I wanted that story. I wanted it to be a part of the book that I was writing and so figuring out a way to create a narrative superstructure around that led to the beginnings of the novel.

Alison Stewart: Like the idea that Cyrus could have been the 67th?

Kaveh Akbar: Exactly, exactly. That Cyrus could have been the 67th child if not for his mother leaving him at home.

Alison Stewart: When we meet Cyrus, he has this wild job. He works as a fake patient for medical students, and he gets really into it. Did you know anybody who ever had this job before?

Kaveh Akbar: It's a real job. It's a real job. The writer, transcendent American prose stylist Leslie Jamison writes about this job in her book Empathy Exams. I also had a former student who briefly had a job as a medical actor who talked to me a little bit about it and who I-- this is a real job. Obviously, I embellished and I created a narrativized version of this job. Such people do exist who are paid to just go in and pretend to be dying patients so that the doctors in training can practice delivering bad news and also practice asking for organs. Which is a difficult conversation to have simultaneously with announcing a great sort of life-shifting grief event to someone.

Alison Stewart: He really goes overboard. At one point in his performance of a woman being told she's dying and really provokes this medical student and shares a disturbing story. What sets him off?

Kaveh Akbar: Well, the medical student is just broadly offensive to him. He describes her "Yankee patrician veneer" and he finds her whole affect generally distasteful, her whole posture of New England royalty. He decides to mess with her and that messing with her riles him up. Cyrus is not a particularly hygienic character. He's not a particularly well-behaved character. He gets messy, he says the wrong things. He's deeply narcissistic in a lot of ways. In all of that, he reminds me of myself. I didn't try to set out to write a story about this hero who behaves with this sort of impeccable ethical fitness at every turn. He can be a bully to people. He can be crude and crass, and he can be dismissive of the love that's freely given to him. I wanted to open the book with a scene of some of that.

Alison Stewart: Is there something wrong with me that I like him?

Kaveh Akbar: Listen, I like him too. I think that anyone who performs as though they are achieving perfect 100 out of 100 ethical fitness at every moment in their lives is probably not being very rigorous about their own searching. Right. What I hope to do is create something that looks a little bit more like the reality in which we live and less like the marvelified reality of monolithic good guys versus monolithic bad guys.

Alison Stewart: You've been really-- you've written about your own issues with addiction and sobriety. How has your personal experience help you create Cyrus?

Kaveh Akbar: Sure, sure. Cyrus is an Iranian-- Of course, of course. I'm very open about this and I'm grateful for you for spending the time with this book to be to generate such generous thoughts. It's not a passive thing to receive a book well. Yes, I've been in recovery for 10 years and change. I am an addict. Of course, Cyrus is indelibly inflected by my own experiences of recovery, in early recovery, in late addiction, in middle recovery. The book opens with him at the end of his active addiction and then moves quickly into his early recovery. It's a time of muted sensation, broadly, where he feels like he was able to just summon narcotically ecstatic joy. Then when he wasn't doing that, he was just in the depths of bone hard despair and sober life.

He finds to be just in this kind of textureless middle where nothing feels ecstatically joyful or nothing feels even- he just doesn't feel a lot in either direction and he is trying to figure out what to do with the sense of having lived past his peaks.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the Martyr! He is very invested in what, a good martyr or a good death or an important death? Why is he so focused on good and important deaths?

Kaveh Akbar: The specter of both of his parents' deaths hovers over him at any given moment. Both of his parents died fairly young, his mother especially. He's obsessed with their deaths and a little bit obsessed with his own too. He doesn't feel particularly attached to remaining in the world anymore, but he wants to make his dying useful. He wants to make his dying momentous in a way that his parents death weren't.

He calls his mother's death on or on Air Flight 655 "A rounding error," and his father worked a menial job on a factory farm in Indiana until he had a stroke and died anonymously in America. He wants a meaningful death. He wants to give his life to something massive. In so doing, he becomes obsessed with historical martyrs, especially secular martyrs. People who instead of dying for a capital G, bearded God who sits on a cloud, died for a country or died for love, or died for land or justice, these sorts of things. He starts writing these poems about these people and writing some essays about these people. He's doing all of this in an effort to figure out how to make his own death meaningful.

Alison Stewart: He's a poet. Is he a talented poet?

Kaveh Akbar: I think that-- he says that he was a-- It is said in the book that he was a good poet when he wrote, but he didn't write very often because he's just in this fugue, this miasma of ennui from which you can't really perceive much of the outside world.

Alison Stewart: Cyrus hears about this artist who's spending her final days at the Brooklyn Museum talking to people. Why did you choose the Brooklyn Museum?

Kaveh Akbar: I love the Brooklyn Museum. It's just a space in which I've spent a lot of time. I've spent a lot of time in the Met and the Guggenheim and the MoMA, all of these spaces, but the Brooklyn Museum and the dinner party and just the layout of the space is just so special and important to me.

Alison Stewart: Why does this woman decide to spend her final days?

Kaveh Akbar: This artist, Orkideh, is doing a kind of Marina Abramović artist is present-esque performance of her own dying at the Brooklyn Museum. We live in a culture that is very insulated from the physical, corporeal realities of death and dying. When we encounter the dead, it tends to be in a very made up fashion. They're literally wearing their finest clothes. They're literally wearing makeup often and pumped full of preservatives, et cetera, et cetera. Our visual correspondence with the dead tends to be this very artificial thing which makes us doubly unmoored when we encounter our beloved going through the quite messy and quite juicy process of actual death and dying.

It is ugly and it is just unhygienic. Again, it's a word that I keep coming back to. I think that she wishes to perform her own dying, spending the last couple of weeks of her life in the Brooklyn Museum, sitting across from people, allowing them to talk with her about dying as a way to peel back that veil a little bit and to de-euphemize the process of death.

Alison Stewart: When Cyrus asks her this question in the book, "Why aren't you spending these last days with your family, with the people who love you?" You write that, "She didn't smile at this, but didn't look wounded either. She let her mouth hang open for a moment before saying his name" with a certain Iranian R. How do you say it?

Kaveh Akbar: Cyrrus.

Alison Stewart: "Cyrrus, I am an artist. I give my life to art. That's all there is. People in my life have come and gone and come and gone. Mostly they've gone. I give my life to art because it stays. That's what I am, an artist. I make art." She paused for a moment, "It's what time doesn't ruin."

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Without giving too much away, what do these conversations do for Cyrus, these conversations with this artist?

Kaveh Akbar: I think that Cyrus thinks very big thoughts and thinks very dramatic, exclamatory thoughts about himself and the world and his own importance in the world. The artist is very dry. She doesn't make fun of him exactly, but she makes fun of some of his ideas. She says, "Oh, and you're a poet and you want to be a martyr? All these Persian checkboxes." She kind of pushes back on his shtick a little bit in a way that is humbling and dignifying for him and usefully complicates his thinking. Then over the course of the novel, these conversations push him narratively in different directions as well, which I don't want to get too into for the sake of preserving the urgency of those moments.

Alison Stewart: In our last moments, is there a martyr you came across in your research that has stayed with you?

Kaveh Akbar: Oh, so many. Of course, yes. Hypatia of Alexandria was a martyr who-- she was a mathematician who was killed by her people for being a female mathematician.

Alison Stewart: For mathing?

Kaveh Akbar: Yes, for mathing about. Bhagat Singh was an Indian revolutionary who was killed very young, and he wrote some extraordinarily moving language around his ideas. Bobby Sands, I spent a lot of time thinking about. There's a Bobby Sands Street to this day in Tehran that runs parallel to Ferdowsi Street, which I think is fascinating. Ferdowsi, the great Persian poet. They really revere him.

Alison Stewart: That was my conversation with poet and novelist Kaveh Akbar about his debut novel, Martyr!, which is out in paperback.