THE RADIANCE, involving autofiction from Ayad Akhtar

THE RADIANCE
AYAD AKHTAR
S&S/Summit Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A mysterious accident along a country road sparks an awakening and an investigation in Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and acclaimed novelist Ayad Akhtar’s most daring work yet—a visionary novel of spiritual transformation in an age of fracture.

When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.

Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Autofiction as I've experienced it has usually fallen just a bit flat. It's a close, close relative, a fraternal twin to the roman à clef, as even Wikipedia tells the enterprising reader in search of a reason for all these damned labels slapped onto stories:

In autofiction, an author may decide to recount their life in the third person, modify significant details and characters, or use invented subplots and imagined scenarios with real-life characters in service of an accurately portrayed self within the narrative. In this way, autofiction largely resembles roman à clef literature, though autofiction typically acknowledges its depiction of the author's real life. {It also shares similarities with faction, a genre devised by Truman Capote to describe his work of narrative nonfiction In Cold Blood I included this because I suspect almost 100% of my readers have read that book}.

I think this read is better categorized as a roman à clef because I, not in Author Akhtar's circle, get the idea of the story and the point of telling it, but feel an empty place where SOMEthing should go...likely a name or names to tell me what is not being said.

It's not being said quite richly, in a finely textured presentation giving we-the-reader subtle and elegant extra clues to Book-Akhtar's emotional and psychic well-being or loss of same. Book-Akhtar's libido is gone post-accident, allowing him the quieter inner life needed to experience "inner transports," less base than mere orgasms. When driving to the college campus where he teaches, his "body seemed to extend beyond itself...as if it were enlarged." Quite a reward for losing one's erections, no? Now, though, he's trying to convey the "wordless magic" of this new self—eventually formally diagnosed as "post-traumatic neuropsychiatric syndrome," utterly new to me as a real diagnosis and, honestly, one I think opens up real possibilities for contextualizing PTSD.

Author Akhtar is a fascinating Asian-American creative and educator, a blend of inheritances from training to family to generational standing, all altered with finality by the awful hate crime that he's subjected to and wrestles control over by means of this book. I'm intrigued by all the most American things about him being used as fuel for hatred of a stranger: a thriver and a striver, he is the object of intended to be murderous rage. It's deeply poignant that one result of the crime is to deprive him of his libido—that essential quality needed to survive, to thrive as a human. It wasn't a planned thing, it can't be, but it was a cruel blow indeed.

In his messy personal life Book-Akhtar subjects himself to consequences after the investigation into the crime begins that are...it's a bad time to be individualistic, let's say, in academia as well as in the wider world. Lots of vectors for judgment, few of them justifiable. I'm more outraged at the intrusiveness of the modern surveillance methods available than I am about someone's private peccadillos. In the assembling of any lynch mob, the distorted version of facts plays a key role...and the said facts are much easier to access than ever today.

I'm not sure where the facts are massaged, that's the point of autofiction after all, but these outrage merchants who are trained to expostulate at the drop of a hat get very wearying. It is a story we're living through the development of in this century; it has, in this novel, therefore to seek an ending in its end. It has neither, which is why I'm giving it four stars; the point of reading a story that is still developing is to trade the satisfaction of an ending for a slice through the layer cake that is a modern academic/creative's life...to get to know the emotional landscape of a developing character.

Young Werther, anyone?