Martyr!

 Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is one of the most entertaining, profound novels written in the last ten years. I read it eagerly, absorbing the first few humorous chapters and enjoying the transformation as the book shifted into a serious meditation on mortality, sensuality, the power of art, the immigrant experience, and sobriety. The protagonist, Cyrus Shams, is one of the great literary characters: an Iranian-American orphan muddling his way through a quarterlife crisis. He's surrounded by friend support that he takes for granted, and also aided by his subconscious, art, God, and history. It takes him much of the novel to realize this, and to locate a meaning in life, a reason to carry on. Akbar is a poet first, and the writing is unflaggingly pretty, erudite, and honest. 

It becomes clear that the lost meaning is similar to the proverbial "God-shaped hole" in most people's experience. Martyr!'s answer to this is not conventional religion, but something else, a persistent thread in the second half of the book. On a personal level, I think the novel's diagnosis is incorrect. I disagree with Akbar. But Martyr! earns my respect even while presenting a worldview I don't share. It's a brilliantly composed work of art, worthwhile in all sorts of ways--literarily, morally, and aesthetically. 

How to Do Nothing

 How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell is a thoughtful extended essay on redirecting our attention. Specifically, the book wants to replace smartphone addiction with a reconnection to the natural world and, to a lesser extent, left-wing activism. Odell lives in Oakland, and she spends much of How to Do Nothing describing its history and landscape. This is inviting and interesting. The book on the whole is a useful, nudging challenge to be more present in the world, and it's impossible to read the whole thing without evaluating your own mental habits.

Some of the book struck me as unintentionally funny. Odell, an artist in academia in the Bay Area, has a specific assumption about the world, and it's what you would expect from an online, millennial, lefty narrator. She often cites performance artists, for example, that undertake extreme (and to this reader, absurd) "installations" as examples of resisting technology. I had trouble understanding the connection between celebrating bioregionalism and, say, living in a welded-shut cage for a year. Another time, at a reading, she is corrected by her audience for using the app "iNaturalist." This is not because bringing technology to her nature walks is counterintuitive, but because learning the names of plant and animal species privileges an "itemizing, scientific view" of the world. The scolding, jargony language of academia infringed on much of Odell's otherwise good ideas, and made for a complicated read. Despite these somewhat silly asides, I enjoyed How to Do Nothing and found myself rooting for Odell's argument. 

The Last Samurai

 The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt engenders a variety of complicated responses. I enjoyed it; I was frustrated and annoyed by it; I was moved by it. The novel follows a single mother and her prodigy son as they make their way through London during his childhood. Far too smart for normal school, he drifts around the city (often on underground rail) and learns various languages and translates various older texts. The absent father is the animating force behind the story. Concerned by the lack of a strong male figure in their lives, the boy's mother watches and rewatches Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, as though the noble men in that film may impart something to her child. Because she won't tell the boy who his father is, he goes on a sort of quest to locate him, with mixed results. This quest mirrors the film in conscious ways. Written in 2000, The Last Samurai employs tricks from that period: different font sizes and genre-collage blends in a late-postmodern mash-up that reminded me of Jonathan Safran Foer and Jennifer Egan. 

DeWitt is a funny and lively writer, and I was initially drawn in. At first, the five-year-old boy learning linguistics was thrilling. But precocious children soon become annoying, and after a few hundred pages of esoteric verb conjugations in Greek or Japanese or whatever, the "brilliance" of the child felt more like someone imposing collegiate linguistics onto a fictional avatar. The writing became tedious and  show-offy. Both the boy and his mother are bitterly condescending to "normal" people--those with average intelligence who appear content with their lives. The idea that the missing father may be normal haunts both characters. I was put off by this savage elitism until the last fifty pages or so, when the novel turned again, into a surprisingly poignant, Hamlet-esque meditation on the futility of life when weighed against the possibility of suicide. Life, rich with possibilities, won out, and I found the ending satisfying. 

Unfortunately, I read the author's  Afterword in my edition, published in 2016. DeWitt reflects on the positive response from her fans (in many ways the book is brilliant, and well written, and inspiring), but then doubles-down on the premise that society would be full of these genius children if we simply removed the barriers provided by structural education. In her mind, the protagonist isn't special, he's just been given opportunities to explore. Most kids would be translating the original Greek in The Iliad if we only let them. I'm sympathetic to reconsidering children's attention spans and potential--particularly around the negative effects of technology--but DeWitt's view is reductive. The characters in The Last Samurai ignore physical education, socialization, altruism, civic-mindedness, spirituality, and family life in their quest to be smart, to be better, to beat the old records. It makes for an anxious life, and frankly, one that seems remote from real children in the real world.