Can Ayad Akhtar Find Out the Identity of Ayad Akhtar from ‘The Radiance’?

Ayad Akhtar has spent his impressive, prize-winning writing career trying to understand himself. At 55, there is a self-consciousness about Akhtar’s writing that lays uncomfortably beneath his immersive prose. Akhtar grew up in a Midwestern town, the son of physician parents but one of the few Muslim students at his high school. He has spoken in interviews about his larger-than-life father, a cardiologist, who drank, gambled, and was an unrepentant adulterer. His father had no patience for religion or any of its rituals. However, his mother, a radiologist, was more invested in faith and so was the author himself until his teenage years when all his faith vanished. He once told a Washington Post journalist about his childhood admitting “I didn’t have a place in the culture as my white friends did.” It’s a discomfort and dislocation evident in almost all his novels and plays.

Akhtar is best known for his works of autofiction like American Dervish (2012), a coming-of-age tale about a young Pakistani boy growing up in 1980’s Wisconsin, and Homeland Elegies (2020), a novel that explores attempting to belong to the American dream in a post 9/11 Trump era America. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Disgraced (2012) — also nominated for a TONY — which tells the story of a Pakistani American lawyer who distances himself from his Muslim heritage in a desperate bid to assimilate into the white upper-class world of Manhattan.

The Radiance: A Novel  
By Ayad Akhtar
Summit Books; 304 pages

In his new breathtakingly beautiful work of autofiction, The Radiance, Akhtar once again uses a piercing first-person voice to bring us deep inside the mind of his protagonist, who is also our narrator, and named Ayad Akhtar like the author himself. The umbrella of fiction frees him to write, while allowing him to control what he chooses to reveal or concea.

In The Radiance, Ayad Akhtar is a man undergoing a radical transformation in his perception of himself after being hit by a truck while riding his bicycle on the side of a deserted road. He wakes days later from a coma and finds the world seems beautiful and harmonious to him in a way it never had before. Everything seems to be touched by light. He doesn’t understand what is happening and even though an MRI shows some slight changes in his brain that might account for his emotional overload, doctors aren’t certain what is going on. Food tastes better. Colors seem alive in an almost animated fashion. His left side feels slightly detached from the rest of his body almost as if it no longer belongs exclusively to him. He spends evenings on his sofa staring into the blankness unperturbed by any disturbing thoughts or emotions.

Akhtar is living in a small rural community in upstate New York State after fleeing a failed romance in Manhattan. He has found a job teaching creative writing at a nearby university thanks to the machinations of his old friend Lucie Neroponte who teaches there as well. He has loved Lucie silently for decades and felt unable to do anything about it. She is married now and lives with her husband Stanford, a physician, who welcomes Akhtar into their marriage bubble as the pandemic rages.

Much of the novel revolves around the narrator’s intense preoccupation with Lucie Neroponte. Akhtar became friends with Neroponte when they were both college students in Manhattan. He felt compelled to reach out to her after reading her scathing essay about an affair she had with her 52-year-old professor which had just ended leaving her distraught. The professor had convinced Neroponte she was his first and only extramarital love and she had believed him. Akhtar was drawn to her essay and impressed by the audacity she brought to it, as well as her staunch refusal to be victimized.  Akhtar and Neroponte remained friends through the years and, decades later, when she heard about his current distress, she reached out to him to offer him a job in the creative writing department at the university she was working at upstate.

Getting involved with Neroponte was always likely to be complicated. She loved to tell him stories about her flirtatious relationship with her old teacher Allan Bloom decades earlier, whose vicious attacks on youth culture, rock music, and the 1960’s made him legendary. Listening to her speak, he feels free from the desire for “anything beyond what I already had.” It is clear to the reader he adores her and longs for a less disengaged life, but Neroponte seems oblivious to his ardor and sees him as just one of her many admirers. We feel Akhtar’s dismay at her nonchalance, yet he remains smitten.

Akhtar is desperate to understand what is happening to his body since the accident. He can’t say for sure who he is anymore, and this threatens his sense of identity. He knows he is no longer who he once was, but who is he now? Akhtar writes “My identity as a writer was at stake. The experiences I was having were so central, so transformative — what did it mean that I couldn’t find the words to convey their force?” He goes to a neurologist for answers, but none are forthcoming. He is concerned he has lost his sex drive but somehow this seems insignificant to him. He finally finds an 81-year-old woman therapist who practices a form of psychotherapy open to alternative realities. He tries to explain to her his current mental state of wellbeing and how this is troubling to him since it is like nothing he has ever experienced before. It terrifies him not to recognize himself anymore.

But in mesmerizing passages he also reveals to her the magic of his new perception: how the human voice sounds like music to him even when the voices he is listening to are shrill; how he feels nothing but tenderness for the doctors he sees failing him every day. Even when he finds the man who struck him, he tells him it has been the best thing that has ever happened to him. Further, his bratty creative writing students who are often distasteful, passive-aggressive, and obnoxious, feel precious to him. He wants to rescue them from the misery in which they dwell.

One student, Susan Yi, seems more genuine and precocious than the others, but turns out to be deeply troubled, and worse, engaged in some nefarious fashion with Neroponte, Akhtar’s good friend. He fears Lucie is acting inappropriately with Susan Yi in ways he can’t really fathom, but he isn’t certain something horrible isn’t going on. But still, his sense of wellbeing remains despite all this tumult.

Akhtar’s prose is magically nuanced with a certain unsureness about what is going on around him. He seems hesitant to confront anyone about anything. He feels a certain loyalty to Neroponte that his therapist thinks has to do with his love for her, but still he is terrified that something horrible is happening or about to happen. This creates an engaging tension. We watch him struggle for any sense of self-assuredness after a lifetime of tentativeness.

Akhtar, both the author and his protagonist who mirrors him closely, understands the mind is a mysterious place, and things can spin dangerously out of control. The afterglow of pleasure in just being alive that followed the accident begins to wane, and he begins to feel anxious as he always was before the accident. His left side still seems to be emitting signals from a strange place that remains unidentifiable.

Akhtar has a writer’s sense when we need relief from all this drama, and he provides it for us with multiple digressions. We learn about others he knows but only from his point of view. We trust his narration; he has gained our loyalty. He tells us a harrowing story about how his father was brutally and repeatedly raped one night in an abandoned school bus in Peshawar when he was only 9. He explains how this sort of sexual violence against little boys happens more frequently in Pakistan than is realized and is spoken about only in whispers. He tells us how his father’s personality overpowered him, making him feel small and unworthy. He recalls a therapist he saw in his thirties who tried to explain to him how someone’s inner and outer reality can collide at certain points in life and thinks perhaps the accident he endured has allowed him to remember too much.

In a rare moment of openness to things he hasn’t considered before, Akhtar has an epiphany thinking about Neroponte. He wonders if perhaps her strongmindedness has blinded him to a “fissure in her heart — a crack where the light was coming through…” The realization makes him think about other things he has ignored or neglected or denied for reasons that he can’t quite fathom anymore. We sense that he does want to move forward though; in a different manner now, that permits him some authority and agency. And we feel joy at the weight of this reckoning and the possibilities it opens for him.