Kaveh Akbar, Sally Rooney, and Political Paralysis in Contemporary Fiction

In Martyr!, Kaveh Akbar’s debut novel, the Iranian-American poet Cyrus Shams is trying to write a book about martyrdom. We learn early, as part of his backstory, that his mother was one of 290 civilians killed when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988—an act of military negligence for which the United States government refused to issue an apology. Cyrus was an infant when it happened. He has no memory of his mother, only the fact of how she died, a fact he does not know how to contain or accept. He can’t sue the Navy. He can’t organize. He can only write poems, grope for sobriety (he’s an addict), and quarry the concept of martyrdom in his mind, asking on every page: What makes a death mean something? Does life really mean anything? Is meaning a right, at all, to someone whose inheritance is a geopolitical incident that most Americans won’t recall? The novel is, in part, a recursive elegy on political helplessness.

Reading Martyr!, one is sunken into this perpetual grief. Akbar describes Ali, Cyrus’ father, watching the Vice President refuse to apologize on television for shooting down the plane his wife was on: “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.” In this moment, he looks down at his infant son who has been crying endlessly, wishing he could produce milk from his chest. Ali feeds little Cyrus formula—probably laced with caffeine, he thinks, to keep the baby awake for more. “That was how the world worked. Mercenary. Nothing to be done about it.”

For the better part of a decade, this leitmotif of cynical, realist resignation has cropped up in the most celebrated contemporary literary fiction. The rich interior life the genre has long afforded its characters has shifted in recent years: the interior has become the primary terrain to reckon with and metabolize the political world, which presses in from the outside. The most acclaimed novels of the 2020s tend to know a great deal about power, capitalism, exploitation, ecological collapse—and to 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 of this strain of anger.

Who can blame Cyrus for his volatility and despair when the event at the center of his grief repeats itself again and again?

Akbar released the novel in early 2024, as Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza, a genocide which was livestreamed on social media for all to witness. By then, the Palestinian death toll had surpassed 26,000—it has almost tripled since (though most experts estimate the true number to be significantly higher). As in Martyr!, mainstream media met these atrocities with a collective shrug and warped them into the language of military necessity. This was the climate into which Akbar’s novel was released; one growing inured to the germs of political impotence that grew in each moment spent online.

Two years after the book’s publication, 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 aftermath of the attack could have been plucked from Cyrus’ backstory: the president cast doubt on American responsibility, and in May, the head of U.S. Central Command told Congress the investigation was “complex,” pointing to the school’s proximity to a missile site. As of this writing, the United States has yet to issue an apology for the massacre. The families in Minab have not yet received acknowledgement from the Pentagon, let alone the meagre grace of compensation that was given to Ali when his wife’s plane was shot down. Who can blame Cyrus for his volatility and despair when the event at the center of his grief repeats itself again and again? How many novels on political malaise will arise from Minab’s bereaved?

Rooney has placed political consciousness at the center of all four of her novels, and all four have registered its futility.

But it is not just those authors embroiled in political violence who can no longer write around it. With far less of a personal stake, Sally Rooney—one of the most widely read literary novelists of the decade—has traced this trajectory across her books with consistency. A self-described Marxist, and more of an activist than any of her characters, Rooney has placed political consciousness at the center of all four of her novels, and all four have registered its futility. In Conversations with Friends, Frances and her circle are fluent in the language of radical critique, using each other as sounding boards to lament late capitalism, discuss communism, acknowledge Palestine’s right to freedom (a radical inclusion in 2017, when the book was published), and the structures of patriarchal society. But this fluency serves little purpose beyond conversational backdrop, changing nothing about their lives or anyone else’s. While Normal People, released in 2018, offers an implicit, Austenian commentary on the texture of class anxiety in its wildly popular love story, Beautiful World, Where Are You dispenses with the subtext and asks, at length and with some anguish, what it means to be politically conscious and essentially useless.

In it, Rooney includes a character who 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.” It is a startling line to come across in a novel, because it describes with painful accuracy the condition the novel itself enacts. Alice, one of the novel’s protagonists (and herself a successful writer), even suggests that the novel as a form works by “suppressing the truth of the world,” by disregarding human suffering. “We care about the love lives of fictional characters,” she says, “if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that.”

As a writer, she sees her own work as “the worst culprit in this regard.” One can only imagine Rooney in Alice’s exact posture. She cannot let her reader, or even herself, off the hook: she refuses escape. As in the worlds of her progressive readers, politics has become so thoroughly embedded in how Rooney, and other writers, see and render the world that there is no clean retreat into simple private life. “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,” Rooney writes in Beautiful World. “Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting.”

These days, the news cycle delivers one catastrophe after another into our palms, each one grieved and raged at in comment sections before we scroll away again. Political feeling has become a largely interior experience, performed publicly but lived privately, with outrage that mostly dwindles into cynical inaction. It is as if, in recent years, books are wanting to share in this rite, or at least adapt it as quotidian for a specter of relatability, for its largely leftist readers. These literary characters, full of empathy and sincerity, seem just as paralyzed as everyone else.

Akbar’s novel—and others like it—may turn out to be the only form available for reckoning with the politically dispossessed, the only way to insist on the weight of a life when the mechanisms of accountability have so devastatingly failed.

Jenny Offill made this paralysis the explicit formal subject in her novel Weather (2020), whose narrator, Lizzie, answers listener emails for a climate change podcast, reads disaster preparedness blogs, frets about her son’s future, and does essentially nothing else. The novel proceeds in spare fragments and aphorisms, disconnected from any real arc of resolution. It is a rendering of the dizziness that comes with trying to navigate regular domestic disgruntlement and the yawning void of looming global catastrophe. Offill sprinkles in jokes to highlight the unnerving selfishness and relentless competition of humanity in the face of horror. “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.

Speaking in an interview about Martyr!, Akbar said that what interests him is “the way that narrative art can return a sense of granularity and individuality to collective loss.” When you read, he says, that tens of thousands of children have been murdered in Gaza, a crushingly large number, narrative can deliver the specificity that data cannot. While Cyrus Shams’ neurotic meaning-making may be a display of solipsism, Akbar’s novel—and others like it—may turn out to be the only form available for reckoning with the politically dispossessed, the only way to insist on the weight of a life when the mechanisms of accountability have so devastatingly failed.

These novels are read and celebrated by people who share their characters’ political vulnerability and their characters’ inaction. They are telling us something true and uncomfortable about the texture of living politically right now. The structural state of being that they are ultimately capturing is one that the West has long ignored but the colonized have always known; a feeling best distilled in the untranslatable Arabic word qaher. It is the internal consequence of subjugation: a melding of rage and grief, born from agonizing helplessness in the face of a crushing reality. As the writer Khadijah Muhaisen Dajani described it, qaher is the result of century-long oppression “cooked slowly” until it “settles in your cells” and becomes a “genetic imprint.” For the first time, a facet of this dyed-in-the-wool trauma is fracturing the surface of mainstream culture, permeating into the sterile, historically insulated “white reality” of popular Western fiction.

By forced proximity to a collapsing world, and hollowed out by the theater of their own democracies, contemporary Western readers are beginning to learn the language of qaher. Yet rather than these narratives culminating in collective disruption, they are confined to the interior resonance of these popular characters. To recognize oneself in Cyrus’s grief, in Rooney’s endlessly discoursing characters, and Lizzie’s paranoid paralysis, offers a kind of crude solace, enabling one to feel less alone at such a perpetual impasse. Perhaps the hunger for this kind of fiction is itself a symptom of the same condition it depicts: a capitulation wherein the acts of feeling and witnessing, through reading, have become our final, all-too comfortable substitutes for action.