Martyr!, Rooney and the Novels of Political Helplessness

On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a war on Iran. In its opening hours, an American missile struck an elementary school in Minab, killing more than 150 people — most of them schoolgirls between the ages of seven and twelve. The United States has yet to apologize. Kaveh Akbar's debut novel Martyr!, published two years earlier, had already mapped the emotional aftermath of an almost identical event.

What does Martyr! actually depict?

Akbar's protagonist, the Iranian-American poet Cyrus Shams, is an infant when the USS Vincennes shoots down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing 290 civilians, including his mother. The US government refuses to apologize. Cyrus grows up with no memory of her, only the fact of how she died — a fact he cannot contain, accept, or litigate. He cannot sue the Navy. He cannot organize. He can only write poems, struggle toward sobriety, and interrogate martyrdom on every page: What makes a death mean something? Is meaning a right for someone whose inheritance is a geopolitical incident most Americans will not recall?

The novel renders political helplessness as a recursive elegy. Akbar describes Cyrus's father, Ali, watching the Vice President refuse to apologize on television: "Ali's anger—a moon. It grew so vast it scared him, so deep it felt like terror […] Ali's anger felt ravenous, almost supernatural, like a dead dog hungry for its own bones." Ali looks at his crying infant son and wishes he could produce milk from his chest. He feeds Cyrus formula instead. "That was how the world worked. Mercenary. Nothing to be done about it."

How fiction metabolizes politics without acting on it

For the better part of a decade, this leitmotif of cynical, realist resignation has recurred in the most celebrated contemporary literary fiction. The genre's rich interior life has shifted: the interior has become the primary terrain where characters metabolize a political world that presses in from outside. The most acclaimed novels of the 2020s know a great deal about power, capitalism, exploitation and ecological collapse — and do very little with that knowledge, formally or narratively, other than feel it agonizingly. "A rage flashing, then expiring like smoke in a match," Akbar writes.

Sally Rooney, a self-described Marxist and more of an activist than any of her characters, has placed political consciousness at the center of all four of her novels, and all four have registered its futility. In Conversations with Friends (2017), Frances and her circle lament late capitalism and acknowledge Palestine's right to freedom — a radical inclusion in 2017 — but the fluency changes nothing. Normal People (2018) offers an implicit Austenian commentary on class anxiety. Beautiful World, Where Are You dispenses with subtext and asks, at length, what it means to be politically conscious and essentially useless.

One character in that novel observes that the only idea on the internet seems to be to "watch the immense human misery unfolding before us and just wait for the most immiserated, most oppressed people to turn around and tell us how to stop it." Alice, a successful writer within the novel, suggests the form itself works by "suppressing the truth of the world." She calls her own work "the worst culprit in this regard." Rooney refuses escape: "When we should have been re-organizing the distribution of the world's resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting."

Jenny Offill made the paralysis explicit as formal subject in Weather (2020). Her narrator Lizzie answers listener emails for a climate podcast, reads disaster-preparedness blogs, frets about her son's future, and does essentially nothing else. The novel proceeds in fragments with no arc of resolution. Offill salts it with jokes, including this one: "Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism? A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One takes out his running shoes and puts them on. 'You can't outrun a bear,' the other whispers. 'I just have to outrun you,' he says."

Minab repeats Cyrus's backstory

Akbar released Martyr! in early 2024, as Israel carried out its assault on Gaza, livestreamed on social media. The Palestinian death toll had then surpassed 26,000; it has almost tripled since, and most experts estimate the true number to be significantly higher.

The aftermath of Minab reads as if plucked from Cyrus's backstory. The president cast doubt on American responsibility. In May, the head of U.S. Central Command told Congress the investigation was "complex," citing the school's proximity to a missile site. The families in Minab have received no acknowledgement from the Pentagon — not even the meagre compensation given to Ali when his wife's plane was shot down. How many novels on political malaise will arise from Minab's bereaved?

Akbar, in an interview, said that what interests him is "the way that narrative art can return a sense of granularity and individuality to collective loss." Data says tens of thousands of children have been killed in Gaza; narrative, he argues, can deliver the specificity that numbers cannot.

What does this change for readers?

These novels are celebrated by readers who share their characters' political vulnerability and inaction. The essayistic tradition behind them names a condition the West has long ignored but the colonized have always known — the untranslatable Arabic word qaher, a melding of rage and grief born from helplessness. The writer Khadijah Muhaisen Dajani describes it as century-long oppression "cooked slowly" until it "settles in your cells" and becomes a "genetic imprint."

Recognizing oneself in Cyrus's grief, Rooney's discoursing characters, or Lizzie's paranoid paralysis offers crude solace. It may also be a symptom of the condition it depicts: a capitulation wherein feeling and witnessing, through reading, have become comfortable substitutes for action. What these novels do not promise — and do not pretend to — is a way out.