Ayad Akhtar does not shy from lightning rod subjects.
As a writer, he repeatedly sticks his neck out in provocative, gripping theatrical plays, including Disgraced, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and novels, including his second, Homeland Elegies, widely hailed as a best book of 2020. His work exposes the fissures of American racial, political and economic identity, and picks at the fraying seams of a country he regards as stressed by a degradation of democracy and capitalist rapaciousness in all walks of life (including financial, political and medical). His writing gets people talking and thinking — and manages to inflame Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
Akhtar's third novel The Radiance is set during the Covid pandemic in a predominantly white upstate New York town "where it's not unusual to see a Confederate flag." Like Homeland Elegies, its autofictional narrator shares the author's name and many of his biographical details — including his birth in America to secular, Pakistani-born doctors, and his career highlights — although not necessarily his actual experiences and thoughts.
The novel recounts what happens after the narrator is knocked off his bicycle by a hit-and-run driver in a pickup truck on a deserted country road. In a nutshell, he loses his spleen and his anger. In the "ambrosial afterglow" of what seems to have been a deliberate hit, the narrator Ayad's perceptions intensify, as if "there's light everywhere" and his "emotions are all in primary colors." He's frequently moved to tears by everyday occurrences such as sunsets. He likens his new sense of harmony, beauty, and completeness to what Dostoyevsky felt after his epileptic seizures.
But the narrator, like the author, is a cerebral, hyperarticulate writer who is thrown when he can't find the words to convey his new heightened, paranormal sensations. He worries how this profound change will impact his writing. He talks to doctors and local friends about this, including a fictional couple central to his story: a professor of Comparative Literature named Lucie Neroponte and her husband Stanford Lewis, a black doctor and poet of some renown.
Although the convalescent narrator has lost his libido in the accident, he is increasingly enamored with Lucie, and looks forward to her soup-bearing visits. Lucie rails about her students' "near-total inability to concentrate," and worse, "having to bear the moralizing brunt of some perceived breach of their pronouns or politics." She declares scathingly: "what these students are absolutely not is anything remotely interesting." The sole exception, she says, is a diligent young woman from Idaho named Susan Yi.
Among its many concerns, The Radiance addresses problems in higher education, including the erosion of attention spans, critical acuity, mental resilience and flexibility in a generation pelted by misinformation on the internet. The novel also considers how the #MeToo movement changed attitudes toward sexual harassment, abuse, and rape.
Around 2000, Ayad tells us, Lucie published a long personal essay called "Growing Pains," about an affair she had in 1990 with a married professor more than 30 years her senior. Lucie wrote that she was a 20-year-old college junior when she seduced him. She candidly described their sacrilegious sex in the church sacristy and library stacks — all of which she found "intoxicating (until it wasn't)." Her essay made a splash. But after #MeToo went viral in 2017, the narrator recounts, "her unrepentant eroticization of a relationship no longer deemed licit" cost Lucie tenure at a prestigious university and cast a shadow over her brilliant academic career. She had landed at a small college in the Hudson Valley.
Yet despite her misgivings, Lucie urges Ayad to fill a vacancy in the creative writing department by teaching a course in autofiction. Susan Yi joins his class. He's soon in hot water, after his writing prompts lead to sexualized content, including a story that suggests that Susan may have had or been groomed for an affair with Lucie.
The Radiance is told in post-radiance hindsight from the narrator's notes, with much commentary along the way. It is a discursive, multi-layered construct that's sometimes a head-scratcher. Academics are run out of town, yet white supremacist arsonists and hit-and-run drivers go scot-free. The novel includes reflections on the writing life and "the self-shaped knot" it ties writers into (particularly self-involved writers), as well as detailed sessions with a psychiatrist trying to untangle changes in the narrator's personality. The late classicist and political philosopher Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, a popular critique of American higher education, figures in Lucie's story, as does Plato's Phaedrus.
In one of the novel's most powerful episodes, Ayad learns from a first cousin, the daughter of his father's long-estranged brother, the root cause of his father's lifelong aberrant behavior: Multiple acts of brutality the two brothers were subjected to as young boys in Peshawar. This revelation, seemingly a tangential footnote to Homeland Elegies, indirectly yet deftly highlights the long tail of trauma that figures in The Radiance.
In his first class session, Ayad tells his students that "convincing fiction ... was a chain of linked actions — believable to the extent they were seen as probable, absorbing to the extent they were felt as necessary." Akhtar rattles a lot of chains in this thought-provoking novel. I'm not convinced they all pass this test, but enough do to add up to a profound reading experience.
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