What Drives Kaveh Akbar? The Responsibility of Survival

When Kaveh Akbar was drinking, he would regularly wake up to find new bruises or gashes on his body, or to find that he’d lost his glasses, his wallet or his car. When he opened his eyes, he might find himself in an alley instead of in his apartment. Once, he got out of bed and realized he couldn’t walk. He had broken his pelvis. There was nothing in his life at the time, he said, to indicate it would turn out terribly well.

But he got sober, and in the years since, he got married, found a job as a creative writing professor at the University of Iowa and wrote poetry that won him an armful of awards. And on Tuesday, Knopf will publish his first novel.

“Eleven years ago, I was pissing the bed,” he said. “And now I’m living this life.”

Akbar’s novel “Martyr!” follows Cyrus, a young Iranian American man who grows up with the story of his mother’s death on Iran Air Flight 655, a commercial airliner that was shot down in real life by the United States Navy in 1988 as it traveled to Dubai, killing everyone on board. Cyrus describes his mother’s death as a “rounding error” — if the number of dead had been 289 instead of 290, the larger significance of the event would not have changed.

Cyrus, who was raised in the United States by his father, is adrift. He has struggled with addiction and depression, and, awash in suicidal despair, is obsessed by the idea of giving his death meaning. He reads about an artist who is dying from cancer and has decided to spend her final days on view in a museum, living and eating and sleeping there. Cyrus travels to New York to meet her.

Jordan Pavlin, the editor in chief at Knopf, said the exclamation point in the title tells you everything you need to know about the novel’s emotional register.

“Once every couple of years,” Pavlin said, “a manuscript lands on your desk that makes you want to get up and yell, ‘The house is on fire! The house is on fire!’”

Akbar, 35, first garnered acclaim as a poet, earning multiple fellowships and Pushcart Prizes for his work. His second book of poetry, “Pilgrim Bell,” was published in 2021. In the poem “There Is No Such Thing As an Accident of the Spirit,” he wrote:

“You can cut the body in half
like a candle to double its light
but you need to prepare yourself
for certain consequences.
All I know about science —
neurons, neutrinos, communicable
disease — could fit inside
a toothpick, with wood to spare.
Blow it away, like an eyelash or
lamplight. Show me one beast
that loves itself as relentlessly
as even the most miserable man.
I’ll wait.”

He has also helped raise the profile of other poets: He has edited two poetry anthologies and, since 2020, has been the poetry editor of The Nation. In that role, he has published work by international poets and a number of incarcerated poets, doing so without mentioning that biographical detail.

During the pandemic, he decided to try his hand at long-form prose. While other people were learning to salsa or to speak German, he said, he put himself on a “narrative diet” of two novels a week and a movie every day.

“It was a completely kleptomaniacal education,” he said. “I’ll read Annie Dillard and steal this and I’ll read Baldwin and steal this and I’ll read Morrison and steal this and I’ll read Nabokov and steal this. Like, oh, that’s a way to get a character through a doorway, or that’s a way to explain how this person got the money to get on a plane so they could have this conversation that I needed them to have.”

As he wrote, he would send pages, usually every Friday, to a friend: the novelist Tommy Orange, whose novel “There There” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and a best seller. The two had only met once before the pandemic, but became literary pen pals and cheerleaders for one another.

“He strikes this really incredible balance of being super cerebral and super heart-filled,” Orange said of Akbar. “A lot of the time, when people are capable of being really cerebral, they can go in a cold direction, but he always stays warm.”

Akbar is that way in person, too. A serious intellect and curious mind, he is easy to smile and practically vibrates with enthusiasm for the world around him. He leans his 6-foot-4 frame forward when he talks, raking his hands through a mane of floppy black hair. On a walk around Central Park this fall, he repeatedly pointed to his forearms to show that the conversation had given him goose bumps.

“He is more excited than anyone I have ever met,” said Paige Lewis, his spouse. “It can make him a little self-conscious that other people aren’t going to be as excited as he is.”

Akbar is like an “exposed nerve,” said Pavlin, his editor. “He’s like a heart walking around in the world. And that beauty is everywhere in the novel.”

Born in Tehran to an American mother and an Iranian father, Akbar and his family moved to the United States, first to Pennsylvania then to New Jersey, Wisconsin and Indiana. An overachieving math and science nerd as a child, he also loved playing the word game Mad Libs by himself.

His poetry sometimes explores themes of identity and belonging, like in the poem “Do You Speak Persian?”

“I have been so careless with the words I already have.
I don’t remember how to say home
in my first language, or lonely, or light.
I remember only
delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,
and shab bekheir, good night.
How is school going, Kaveh-joon?
Delam barat tang shodeh.
Are you still drinking?
Shab bekheir.”

When he was a teenager, he started drinking, and by the time he was in college, he said, he was an alcoholic. Akbar said that he found himself a psychiatrist and then lied to him, faking symptoms so the doctor would prescribe him pills, which Akbar would often sell or trade to buy more alcohol. When he was about 25, a year after he’d gotten sober, a doctor told him his drinking had already damaged his liver.

“There’s not a high in this world I haven’t made myself sick off of,” Akbar said.

Much of his work explores addiction, including his first book of poems, “Calling a Wolf a Wolf”; a poetry anthology he edited with Lewis, “Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance”; and now, “Martyr!”

“It’s so lucky, / this living forever all at once,” he wrote in the poem “Portrait of the Alcoholic With Relapse Fantasy.” “When you turn / on the lights, you’re inconsolably / glad. You could stop this whenever, but why?”

In graduate school, he got sober with the help of one of his professors at Butler University, Dan Barden, who started bringing Akbar to sobriety meetings. For about a month, Akbar said, he showed up to the meetings drunk and slurring, sneering at people and their problems, insisting that he was fine.

Then one day, while he was standing outside a meeting smoking a cigarette, an older man laid down a challenge: He bet Akbar couldn’t go one day without drinking.

Out of spite, Akbar said, he wanted to prove the man wrong.

That night, he said, he didn’t drink. He lay in bed alone, hallucinating and vomiting, with a bottle of whiskey next to his mattress. Then he did it for another night. And then another. And another. He hasn’t had a drink since.

What he has done is try to help other people get and stay sober, as well. He has sponsored people, he has run meetings inside jails and halfway houses, and he hosts a monthly sober writers’ group.

“The sense of whiplash is omnipresent, as is the sense of survivor’s guilt,” Akbar said of the change in his circumstances. “So I think a lot about the responsibility implied by my survival, about how to spend the time I’ve been afforded.”