Books I Read This Month: February 2024
Kara Swisher • Sarah Bernstein • Calvin Trillin • Kaveh Akbar
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story (Kara Swisher)
Like a lot of people who fall out of love far too late, Kara Swisher fell hard. A veteran C-suite reporter in Silicon Valley famous for her sharp elbows and big scoops, Swisher was never exactly deceived by the men—almost exclusively men—who descended upon Silicon Valley promising to move fast and break things, but she never stopped believing in their larger mission. At legacy media companies like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, on podcasts, and at the conferences she co-founded with Walt Mossberg which made her wealthy, she didn’t shrink from holding feet to the fire, but she never wanted to burn down the house. While she was always quick to critique, even openly mock, the poor decisions of the sector’s billionaires, to skewer their ahistorical takes, she remained besotted by the new technological tools and the path they could create. Swisher wasn’t a cultist, but she certainly was a true believer, a brilliant person who was in the right time and place to see a future others were failing to discern, as the old guard dismissively laughed at her when she correctly predicted that the technologists were going to stage a successful coup on the culture. It must have felt nice to be right.
She had her own blind spots, though, and based on Burn Book, the tech journalist’s 2024 memoir, even now she doesn’t seem to fully appreciate how outsize they were. There were so many flashing warning signs she failed to heed along the way, as she was getting endorphin rushes from being fast and first reporting on mergers and acquisitions. You would think someone who writes this sentence might realize she was in the presence of dangerous vandals: “I had no doubt that Jeff Bezos would eat my face off if that is what he needed to do to get ahead.” If Swisher’s bruising taunts in print and in person directed at the titans of industry were actually effective, it’s not likely she would have maintained such a strong place in the Silicon Valley firmament, that she could have kept attracting so many A-listers to the conferences enriching her. (And the money she was making on those conferences was a compromise even if she sees herself as equal parts reporter and entrepreneur.)
Yet there she was in 2022, still not having digested the most obvious of clues, excited that the drugged-up edgelord Elon Musk had purchased Twitter, believing his “vision” to be desperately needed at the company.
Sure, some of the bigfoots of Menlo Park and Mountain View stopped talking to her over the years as they grew more insulated by their ballooning wealth and felt her barbs beneath them, but many still made the pilgrimage. Was it just vanity on their part, or did they simply realize that her journalism was more feature than bug? That she was just another piece of the show that was building the industry ever larger? It wasn’t performative, but perhaps it wasn’t especially effective. When it came to Silicon Valley’s wanton destructiveness, there were, on more than one occasion, supposed breaking points for Swisher—a 2014 New York magazine article that it made it clear to her that she had become “too much a creature of the place,” and the come-to-Satan moment in 2016 when America’s top technology business leaders dutifully queued up when summoned to Trump’s feet after he became President. Yet there she was in 2022, still not having digested the most obvious of clues, incredibly excited that a drugged-up edgelord had purchased Twitter, believing his “vision” was desperately needed at the company. “When everyone else zigs, he not only zags, but practically pretzels and then, well, takes off for the cosmos,” she obliviously wrote of Musk at the time. Only now does she offer a full-throated mea culpa, but it’s long been well past midnight.
As an origin story of Swisher herself, the book recalls two pivotal moments that shaped her worldview, one in a personal sense and the other professionally. Her beloved father’s death from a brain aneurysm when she was five left her deeply ingrained with the knowledge that this window of consciousness we’ve somehow been gifted with is once more quickly shut tight. Dad, a 34-year-old physician running a department at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, had just purchased a new home for his young family but crumpled and died before they moved in. He was living relatively large and, then, without warning, not at all. Her mother remarried, and her stern, unpleasant stepfather sold the house and gave away her father’s dog. His severe parenting spurred Swisher’s intellectual development, but perhaps the greatest lesson she gleaned from the altered dynamic was about the arbitrary nature of the powers that can loom over you. The central epiphanic moment in regards to understanding the future of the Internet occurred when she was at Duke in the 1990s on a fellowship break while a greenhorn reporter at the Washington Post. As was to become her modus operandi, she decided to impulsively follow her curiosity, downloading a full Calvin & Hobbes cartoon collection, jamming up the computer system and ticking off the system admin. She realized in that moment what Richard Feynman had imparted in his 1959 speech “Plenty of Room at the Bottom”—that “a book can be all books,” and that in the near future everything that could be digitized would be digitized.
During those analog days, she desperately wanted something fresh, not realizing at the time that the new boss was likely to be as bad as the old boss.
You could hardly blame Swisher for wanting the media, and more broadly, society, to change. She was a closeted lesbian at Georgetown when the university was particularly antipathetic to LGBTQ people, and she came of age during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, which made her forgo her fondest dream of becoming a CIA agent. (Her too-forgiving judgment about institutions clearly extended beyond Silicon Valley.) And being a woman of any sexual orientation meant being treated as a second-class citizen in media, technology and pretty much everywhere else. Some of her most justifiable venom is directed at the pre-Internet D.C. pundit John McLaughlin, an ink-stained wretch who also hosted an unpleasant TV politics roundtable that was a homely marriage of C-SPAN and dodgeball, political punditry as cartoonish combat sport. The Beltway gasbag—a “truly awful human being,” as the author describes him—sexually harassed one of her fellow female employees and threatened Swisher, telling her she’d be fired if she refused to make him a piece of toast if he ordered her to do so. (She told him it wasn’t happening; he never ordered.) During those analog days, she desperately wanted something fresh, not realizing at the time that the new boss was, in many ways, likely to be as bad as the old boss.
In fact, since the tools they were working with were much more powerful, the new bosses could be even worse. Swisher should not have been caught unawares. She minored in Holocaust Studies in college, and there’s no more striking example than Nazi Germany of how societies in possession of advanced technology are not necessarily moral ones. Demonstrating her familiarity with analysis of technology at the highest level, she quotes the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio, who succinctly explained in Politics of the Very Worst the doubled-edged sword of tech: “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution…Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.” And when you invent social media, you invent new ways for neo-Nazis to gather and conspiracists to spread dangerous lies.
Swisher may have seen her coffers expand while doing business for years with Rupert Murdoch, but she’s the one who dubbed him “Uncle Satan,” isn’t she? Oh snap, Rupe!
Not surprising from a wordsmith like Swisher, who’s honed her craft against decades of deadlines, the book is spotlessly written, and she uses her skills to draw some disquieting portraits. Across several scenes, Mark Zuckerberg emerges as the most unflattering of the young so-called geniuses. There he is in 2016 posting a picture on Facebook of himself and several coworkers completely stoked to be doing a super-cool jog through Tiananmen Square, with no mention of the 1989 student protests that were brutally put down by the authoritarian government. He later explained to Swisher that no one else had raised the issue with him about the fun run or thought it problematic. Two years later, when the journalist interviewed him on a podcast, the two discussed free speech, and Zuckerberg said very confidently that Holocaust deniers might not to mean to lie, that their “intent” might not be clear, and also defended Alex Jones’ right to spew vile misinformation on his uber-powerful platform. It was self-immolation. Swisher also tried to shame tech CEOs, almost exclusively an all-boys club, into diversification. She recounts how she would cleverly publish photos of the board members of ginormous Silicon Valley corporations to demonstrate their woeful lack of female representation. The best ideas are often the simplest, and it was a clever tactic.
Swisher focuses in Burn Book mostly on these small victories, and the tone is largely triumphal, with the author recounting all the times she was correct about what was coming next in the wired world and still believing (just look at the book’s cover) that she’s a badass, a rebel, the one who stuck it to the man. Swisher may have seen her coffers expand mightily while doing business for years with Rupert Murdoch, but she’s the one who dubbed him “Uncle Satan,” isn’t she? Oh snap, Rupe! And the awful Aussie media magnate was far from the only potentate whose circle she moved in. “Thinking like these CEOs was a big part of my job,” Swisher shares at one point, and perhaps she should have thought like them far less often. The problem with covering the top of the organizational chart so exhaustively is that you’re located as far from the ground as your subjects.
The journalist focused on the wunderkinds who often lost sight of the actual human beings being impacted by their grand visions.
You’ll read in this book about Jeff Bezos, but there’s not a word about the warehouse workers who’ve been treated horribly by Amazon. There are anecdotes about Steve Jobs (and a vague “Steve Jobs was in no way perfect” criticism), but there’s nary a mention of the sweatshop workers, some children, who the Apple legend used to repair and rebuild his brand into what is now a multi-trillion-dollar company. Nor is there a sentence about the absurdly manipulative branding in which he used the image of Cesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to sell aggressively marked-up consumer electronics. You learn about the personality types of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, but Google’s tax avoidance, which has had a major impact on Main Street, isn’t even an afterthought. The journalist focused on the wunderkinds who often lost sight of the actual human beings being impacted by their grand visions. Too often in this book Swisher is guilty of the same.
At long last, as we sit here in 2024, as Twitter has morphed into X, a company friendly to anti-Semites and transphobes—a company run by an anti-Semite and a transphobe—Swisher has finally had it—probably. The author appears to have given up on the sector as an agent of good, and you’ll be forgiven if you’ve given up on her long before this point. She left her perch in Silicon Valley and lives with her second wife and their bunch of beautiful children in Washington D.C., as she continues to write, but in the aftermath of a mini-stroke, also takes time to garden and nurture, only now realizing that much of what she hoped would be revolutionary turned out to be regressive. It’s a reminder that being so in love with the future can mean you misunderstand the present. Ultimately Swisher’s book is not most important for being a memoir or a forecast of where technology is headed—it’s a cautionary tale, though mostly an unwitting one.•
Study for Obedience (Sarah Bernstein)
The language and tone of Sarah Bernstein’s unnerving 2023 novel borders on what you’d encounter in a fable, a story full of seemingly enchanted gardens offering poison apples, which makes her very contemporary narrative seem like folklore of yore, something new and old at the same time. In her tale, rituals to ward off curses exist alongside social media, and, really, what could be truer knowing what we do at this point. In America, and in other dots on the map, the demon-haunted future Carl Sagan so feared is upon us, and the author’s gambit works perfectly because she meditates on the ineffable ill feelings that have always existed within humans and likely always will, superstitions and fears that stubbornly sustain despite the advances of science.
The almost plotless story, a long series of misunderstandings and accusations, centers on a nameless woman who descends upon a provincial town in a “Northern country” at the request of her wealthy, imperious brother, whose wife and children have abandoned him. He needs his submissive sibling to act as a servant to him, and the woman agrees, moving into his spacious home, which is located in their family’s ancestral country, a place they were historically forced to flee because of their ethnicity. (They are Jewish.) One of her first sights after arriving in town is of a gray rabbit dead on her brother’s property, its intestines plucked clean by a rapacious bird. It’s only the beginning of the predation she’ll witness.
Her goal from the first was to take up less space, to be as accommodating as possible to others.
The woman is barely tolerated by the longstanding members of the community, who fear her from the start as if she were a witch, an unwanted “other” likely to deliver woe, a scapegoat for all that ails them. She can’t speak the local tongue but the derision needs no interpreter. When she passes by women with small children, the parents shield their babies’ faces, not wanting them to make eye contact with the foreign woman. “I was not from the place, and so I was not anything,” she tells us, but it’s worse than that: She’s something—she’s the wrong thing. From birth, the woman, the youngest of a large brood, was trained by her parents to be servile to her siblings, obedient to their needs. Her folks saw no promise in her and wanted their time to themselves, so she was schooled in obsequiousness. “From a young age I was heedful, I took instruction easily and tried to live according to the narratives,” she says. Her goal from the first was to take up less space, to be as accommodating as possible to others.
She was closest to her strange, aloof eldest brother, the one who’s now summoned her, as he alone recognized in her some utility. “He took a particular interest in me, the youngest, so many siblings between him and me, so many years, the rest of the family allowed him this indulgence although they had marked me as a lost cause from birth, weak of lung, allergic to most fruits, a scrawny and pale infant with wispy hair,” she tells us. It wasn’t a particularly joyful relationship. One day her brother put a large captive female frog next to a juvenile male one, knowing the older amphibian would swallow her companion whole. As an adult, the brother has made a lot of money in business deals and is keen on illegal online pornography. Despite his depravity—or perhaps because of it—he’s much more accepted among the locals. He’s given to rationalizing anti-Semitism, even implicitly being “understanding” of the Holocaust. He compares the students of today, the women and the minorities, to the Nazis of yesterday, for their protesting, their canceling. He can relate to the evil in the community because it’s also deeply embedded within him.
It’s a nightmarish scenario, and it’s really no worse than things that have actually happened in life—things that continue to happen.
When her sibling takes off without much of an explanation on a long trip, the woman is left to care for his manse and elderly dog. Things quickly deteriorate even further. An angry woman shows up on the property and bellows at her in a language she can barely understand, apparently because she believes that her sibling’s canine has impregnated her own dog. It’s an impossibility since the brother’s dog has been neutered, but the woman nervously surrenders some currency to make up for the slight. What’s interesting is that even after it proves to be a phantom pregnancy, the town continues to blame the woman for the episode—and she begins to blame herself.
Beyond this unfortunate event, the list of unlucky incidents occurring in the burg since the woman’s arrival, events that no one could remember happening previously, soon grows long, including the madness and necessary termination of cows, the demise of an ewe and her nearly born lamb, the containment of domestic fowl and a potato blight. The death of the female sheep and her baby lamb makes for a particularly grotesque scene. The woman happens upon the pregnant ewe as she’s entangled in a mesh fence, the now-dead calf half-emerged from her, its eyes pecked out and devoured by some bird seeking lutein. It’s nightmarish, and it’s really no worse than things that have actually happened in life—things that continue to happen.
“I wanted to be good in a terrible world.”
Bernstein works some remarkable passages of dystopian poetry into her economically told story. “Here, I thought,” the woman tells us, in expressing her bleak worldview, “as I made my slow way home, my fingers stained by the new, fresh berries, here was what came to the surface after so many throes and convulsions. Soon we would no longer need to withdraw to the desert for a space of contemplation and self-abnegation. Soon, personal ascesis would arrive in the form of one more letter, one more mass mortality event, one more migration stopped by mass annihilation. Nature and well being, the Home Office, any number of crooks and lowlifes. I wanted to be good in a terrible world.”
But what if being good isn’t enough in a terrible world? Sometimes it isn’t. As the woman’s story careers even further sideways, it becomes apparent that some showdown between her and the townsfolk is inevitable. She has told us that she was instructed from early in life that her “essentially barbarous nature needed to be controlled,” but what happens to such disciplined people when society’s barbarous nature can no longer be contained?•
The Lede: Dispatches from a Life in the Press (Calvin Trillin)
Soon after tucking into Calvin Trillin’s 2024 collection of profiles, essays, columns and deadline poetry, all of which focus on what used to be called the press, you’ll come upon the only false note in the worthwhile-if-uneven volume. In 1998, the writer and professional eater wrote a piece making himself seem like he’d been one of the underdogs when a cub reporter, not one of the elites—“even then journalism had a sprinkling of people from families that has always taken first class crossings for granted”—seeming to forget he’d been chairman of the Yale Daily News and a member of the Scroll and Key Society while at the university. Whether he realizes it or not, Trillin has been one of the haves from the jump. It’s an odd flex and worth mentioning in relation to this book because the people who most interest Trillin in the media are other boldfaced names like himself. He shares none of Gay Talese’s working-class interest in those who toil in the guts of the media operations—the typesetters and such, the “minor characters in major-league settings.” These are the A-listers who’ve made the grade. That’s not to say Trillin isn’t an immensely decent guy. We know from his writing on the Civil Rights Movement—the book concludes with an essay revisiting his 1961 reportage for Time about the Freedom Riders—and other social issues, that he was often decades ahead of America’s molasses-speed moral progress. But when he promises to present in this book a “picture from multiple angles of what the press has been like over the years since I became a practitioner and observer,” his purview isn’t as expansive as he believes.
The highlights of the collection are long New Yorker profiles Trillin wrote about a few of his fellow big-time media figures. The most famous is his sterling 1986 portrait of Edna Buchanan, the Miami Herald crime reporter who raised the bar for those assigned to type about toe tags, employing crisp, hard-boiled language in her articles about Dade County’s high body count, as she covered cops and criminals, categories sometimes known to overlap. An unhappy Jersey girl who worked in a coat factory to help her struggling family earn money, Buchanan believed she had some native talent for composition and took an evening course in writing at a local college. On a vacation to Miami with her mom, she was immediately arrested by the sandy beaches and palm trees and knew she’d found her home. It was easy getting journalism work in those days if you loved writing more than money, and Buchanan pounced on the opportunity, eventually making her way in 1973 to the Herald and the crime desk. She wasn’t quite as cold as the cadavers she often had to peer at, but she also wasn’t easily shaken by the nonstop violence of the police beat. “It was interesting as heck,” she said, of her experience of shooting an Uzi at a firing range. It’s a phrase she would regularly use to describe gruesome information she’d happen across in a homicide case or an arson. One passage simultaneously demonstrates the flair for fine points that the portrait writer and crime reporter share, a facility that makes all the difference: “To write about a murder, Edna is likely to need details that wouldn’t help an investigator close a case. ‘I want to know what movie they saw before they got gunned down,’ she has said. ‘What were they wearing? What did they have in their pocket? What was cooking on the stove? What song was playing on the jukebox.’” The whole piece is interesting as heck.
He was also sort of a brusque asshole with a plus-one ego, and we learn how Apple’s miserable father demeaned him his whole life, feeding an outsize ambition in his son that was both blessing and curse.
Another long portrait, from 2003, is of the legendary New York Times journalist R.W. Apple Jr., the kind of larger-than-life reporter who could only exist during the heyday of the Print Age, when expense accounts had enough square footage that wine cellars could be squeezed into them. Apple was a brash, egotistical, talented scribe who could quickly compose lucid copy on matters of international political import or the finest French restaurants, with equal aplomb. He was also sort of a brusque asshole with a plus-one ego, and we learn how Apple’s miserable father demeaned him his whole life, feeding an outsize ambition in his son that was both blessing and curse. Trillin remarks on Apple’s mellowing over time, breezily sharing that he would at an advanced age only occasionally reduce waiters and other service people to tears, the author completely tone-deaf to how awful that sounds. Trillin is a mensch who goes out of his way to understand the failings of others, but he sometimes stretches that impulse too far. There are those occasions when empathy isn’t the most appropriate response.
A 2001 profile of Canadian-British media magnate Conrad Black is middling at most, a piece whose inclusion seems to have been dictated merely by its thematic suitability. Black was a Conservative newspaper publisher who renounced his Canadian citizenship in order to accept peerage offered him by England. The Lord Black of Crossharbour later found his ass cooling for almost four years in a Sumter County correctional facility after being convicted of fraud, and, like rapper Kodak Black (no relation), was pardoned by Donald Trump. On the face of it, it might seem like this is an interesting Icarian tale of hubris, but if Black has anything resembling a personality, Trilling can’t locate it. I doubt it’s the writer’s fault; the piece reads like someone attempting to rev up a russet potato with jumper cables.
In another entry, the author tries to make Morley Safer, a 60 Minutes “authority” and an amateur painter, seem appealing, but even alchemy has its limits.
The “R.I.P.” section reintroduces the short, punchy postmortems Trillin penned when notable industry friends died. We learn that Victor Navasky, a publisher at the Nation and other Liberal periodicals, was infamously parsimonious with writer payouts, capable of pinching a penny so tightly that Abraham Lincoln’s head wounds would threaten to reopen. Molly Ivins was the most famous of Texas columnists in an era when Democrat Ann Richards could still be Governor of the state, an epoch that now seems as distant as the Precambrian. Ivins was an astute observer of local and national dynamics and a righteously acerbic wit, once saying of a particularly dim-bulb Texas lawmaker that “if his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” She also struggled mightily with alcoholism, a topic Trillin never broaches in the brief piece. In another entry, the author tries to make Morley Safer, a 60 Minutes “authority” and an amateur painter, seem appealing, but even alchemy has its limits. The piece about the longtime erudite New York journalist Murray Kempton is solid enough, though David Remnick’s profile of the scribe remains the final word.
The most interesting piece is the 1986 profile of Texas print provocateur John Bloom, who created his alter-ego, Joe Bob Briggs, at the Dallas Times Herald, as the city was experiencing an oil boom and the upstart paper was trying to overtake its more staid competitor, the Dallas Morning News, in circulation. What makes it so fascinating is that Trillin and Briggs are similar in that they’re both considered humorists while they are polar opposites in the type of comedy they deliver. In the introduction, Trillin writes how he’s often described as “wry,” which he believes to be a gentle euphemism for “almost funny.” He’s not being modest, as based on the light verse and humor pieces in this collection, no one who’s undergone a recent hernia operation is in any danger of reopening their wounds. (In all fairness, there’s one great line about Richard Nixon receiving a less-than-warm welcome in 1979 from Manhattan co-op boards, with Trillin writing that the disgraced former President was being treated as if “he was Jewish or a tap dancer,” but that’s about it.) The point of Trillin’s jokes that have appeared in the upscale magazines of his age like the New Yorker was to present something that can pass for humor without being in any way upsetting. There is a positive and negative to the style. On one hand, Trillin has rarely written a joke that was offensive or aged poorly. On the other, Trillin has rarely written a joke.
The crass Joe Bob Briggs character was, conversely, created to offend. The Vanderbilt-educated Times Herald film critic Bloom thought it would be fun to manifest another self, a Texas redneck who would review the slasher flicks and trash films that covered the screens at drive-in theaters in the state, and to deliver his judgments in the crudest manner, working in copious “jokes” about women, gay people and minorities. (I won’t repeat any of it because it’s that bad and not at all funny.) It was putatively a satire of those Texans clinging to backwards attitudes, but as Bloom’s own personality became subsumed by his creation, the racism and sexism spewed by the character grew ever more pronounced. He didn’t heed warnings that his bit had gone way too far, and it all ended in a predictable Imus-like implosion after a particularly bigoted parody of the lyrics to “We Are the World.” As a psychological portrait, you can’t really do better than a refined, soft-spoken person disappearing into a Bubba monster of his own making, but what adds to the intrigue is that you have two contradictory comic sensibilities on display, the milquetoast variety and the over-the-edge offerings. Somewhere between Calvin and Joe Bob is where the best humor resides.•
Martyr!: A Novel (Kaveh Akbar)
Cyrus Shams pretends to be sick for a living, acting out scenarios in an Indiana hospital as a make-believe patient for young doctors receiving training in bedside manner. He’s an aspiring poet, not an aspiring actor, but he takes the job seriously, bringing a strange authenticity to the roles. One day he portrays a diabetic accountant who’s had to surrender a limb, on another a widow with an inoperable brain tumor. Before each performance he reads an index card inscribed with the bio of the fictional person he’s to portray, making special note of where they reside on the 1-10 pain scale. Sometimes a patient is a four and sometimes an eight, but Cyrus himself, a recovering addict overwhelmed by suicidal ideation, is consistently at the top of register. For reasons that become clear as the multi-narrator, time-shifting story progresses, the 27-year-old Iranian-American man is obsessed with martyrs—Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc, Hypatia of Alexandria—and longs to be one. He’s playacting as sick, but he’s also really sick, the kind of sick that can kill you.
If the scenario of a wounded, addicted young man choosing to toil inside a medical institution is reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s classic Jesus’ Son, Kaveh Akbar’s excellent 2024 debut novel will soon fan out across the globe, as the narrative takes its impetus from a real-life international incident that occurred in the Middle East, the Reagan Era downing by an American navy warship of an Iranian commercial airliner, when all 290 passengers were instantly turned to ashes by a pair of surface-to-air missiles. Cyrus was five then, the son of a doting father and a skittish mother, living in Tehran. His mom was aboard the fateful Flight 655 on her way to Dubai to visit her brother, a former soldier suffering severely from PTSD. The family of three suddenly becomes a bereft party of two.
The focal point arrives in the person of a mononymous, cancer-stricken artist Orkideh, who’s doing her final performance piece at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Dad, wanting to escape his grief and the well-meaning relatives who constantly remind him of his anguish, moves with his son to the American Midwest, making a wage doing dirty work at a chicken-processing plant. Cyrus grows up, neither feeling particularly Iranian nor American, a gay kid trying to pass for straight, filled with angst as most adolescents are, but still basically on a steady path. When he reaches college age, however, his father dies and Cyrus finds alcohol and drugs, and the combination causes the young man to come apart. He gets high as much as possible with a posh girlfriend and then a concerned boyfriend, hoping to keep the pain within him at bay. Some money he received from the U.S. government as a weak restitution for the murder of his mother allows him to slide along financially, as he purposely remains underemployed, still working on an undergraduate degree as he hobbles toward 30. If he’s to take his writing beyond open mics, if he’s going to “make his death matter,” he knows he needs to find some centerpiece for his proposed book about martyrs.
The focal point arrives in the person of a mononymous Iranian artist Orkideh, a cancer-stricken art-world star doing her final performance piece at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The exhibition, “DEATH-SPEAK,” is a straightforward concept: Orikideh, who’s terminally ill, will live her last days in a room at the museum, making herself available for one-on-one talks with patrons until she can speak no more. They can discuss anything, though mortality, of course, is a natural topic given the circumstances. With the urging of his kindly boyfriend, Zee, Cyrus decides to use some of his remaining savings to travel to New York to converse with the artist, hoping she can share with him essential truths about the nature of a noble death. It may be the answer to his creative quagmire or perhaps just another false start, but it’s his best option at the moment.
The narrative’s big reveal is purposely telegraphed—you may even be able to guess from this review, but you’ll certainly figure it out long before its arrival should you read the novel.
Orikideh is charmed by the pained young man though concerned about his suicidal talk, which is explicit at this point. “I’ve been thinking about dying,” he tells her. “Dying soon. Or, I guess, killing myself soon, but that sounds so mechanical.” Like pretty much all people existing in a state of constant agony, Cyrus is steadfastly narcissistic and often infuriating, because he’s in pain all the time and it’s hard for him to focus his attention anywhere else. Orikideh encourages him to keep coming to talk to her each day and he does, finding comfort in speaking to this older woman, as he relates to her his life story, in between asking her questions about her approaching end. But something odd and disconcerting occurs one day. During one of their conversations, Orkideh makes a specific reference to Cyrus’ mother dying in a plane crash, a detail about her death that he hasn’t divulged. He’s sure there’s no such information online, so how did she know? He plans to ask her about her comment at their next encounter.
The narrative leads to a big reveal, which is purposely telegraphed—you may be able to guess just from this review, but you’ll certainly figure it out long before its arrival should you read the novel. The fun is in learning how the author makes it all credible, this audacious, even preposterous, twist. He tosses a hand grenade into a souffle, and the whole novel should collapse, but Akbar miraculously makes it work. Like a lot of debuting novelists, he throws in every last creative idea—chapters that relate Cyrus’ dreams about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Lisa Simpson, etc.—but if it’s a busy novel à la Salman Rushdie, it’s also an effective, exuberant one. In one chapter narrated by Cyrus’ mom set in a time before the plane crash, she admits that she “never really loved being alive,” a prelude to her son’s bleak view. For all its focus on death, though, Akbar’s first novel is fully animated, ultimately a celebration of creativity, love, and, yes, life.•