There’s a direct line from the paper of record’s scandalmongering to the Trump administration’s assault on the academy. In early 2025, the government opened its investigation into five universities, including Columbia, alleging that, in the wake of student protests condemning Israel’s actions after Hamas’s attacks of October 7, the schools showed “institutional indifference to the wellbeing of Jewish students.” ICE targeted Palestinian Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil for his role as a negotiator in the protests, arresting him in the lobby of his university housing and keeping him in detention for months, despite the fact that he held a green card. Meanwhile, the university agreed to pay a more than $200 million settlement, a win for Trump. College should probably be like Vegas: What happens on campus stays there. But umbrage about kids today is too useful for the project of the right.
Ayad Akhtar understands what The New York Times doesn’t, that the dramas and travails of the righteous young are not that interesting.
The novel’s center instead is the strange mental and physical state of the narrator, also named Ayad Akhtar. A novelist and sometime teacher of creative writing, Ayad is a transplant from New York City, arriving just before the pandemic—a period he passed in a bubble with his neighbors Lucie, an academic, and her husband, Stanford, a Black surgeon and poet. There are portents all around: Their home overlooks a graveyard where enslaved people have been interred, a site the couple restored. “I could feel the lingering bad blood in the furtive, nasty looks Stanford sometimes got at the local municipal course where he and I occasionally played golf, among the only men of color I ever saw there,” Ayad notes.
In his previous novel, 2020’s Homeland Elegies, Akhtar also offered readers a protagonist who shared his name, in the tale of an acclaimed playwright making his way through an America riven by 9/11. “As writers, we always worked from ourselves,” Ayad tells the students in his seminar “Investigations in Autofiction” in the new novel. Naturally, a writer will be attentive to the workings of his mind, Ayad perhaps more so than most, given that memory and the self are the wellspring of his art. He doesn’t seem to mourn his spleen; indeed, he credits its loss with giving the world “an eternally newborn, rosy-fingered hue.” The syndrome that provides the novel its title would be a pleasure if it weren’t also so disorienting:
He loses interest in sexual release, and finds his grasp of time and memory quite changed. It’s almost an awakening: “Time was a picture,” Ayad tells us.
The police tell Ayad that whoever collided with him had been accelerating, so perhaps we should think of this as attack instead of accident. While the novel does have some cursory business with the local police, it is not a procedural. (The resolution of this storyline is gutsy, though it will infuriate a reader who expects, if not justice, at least closure.) Most—perhaps too much—of the book is devoted to fixing in language the elusive sensation the narrator is experiencing. I read this as an attempt to dramatize the cognitive dissonance of the modern era, the general weirdness of our reality, which is, perhaps, impossible to convey. Some of the symptoms make sense—a lack of appetite, the slip not into sleep but a “lubricated, almost buttery sensation along the nerves and in the mind.” Some of them are more abstract: The left side of his body feels weaker, fine, but also “denser with sensation, and, strangest, as if time itself moved more slowly there.”
Lucie is a compelling figure, a onetime disciple of the rock star philosopher Allan Bloom. “Bloom joked that he was still trying to figure out how to break her; she joked back that she welcomed the day he finally would.” Around the same time, she was romantically involved with an older man, married, another academic; her writing about this affair (“a virtuosic mind-fuck of a piece”) made her a star.
She does have a single, star acolyte, called Susan Yi. Lucie secures our narrator an adjunct gig, and, perhaps predictably, Susan turns up in his autofiction seminar. Like apprentice painters sketching the old masters, the writers are asked “to identify an inciting action from a story they admired, then reconfigure that action by transposing it into a setting drawn from their own lives.” Predictable, too, that Susan’s story seems to dramatize her intimacy with Lucie, a mentor of sorts, as well as with her husband, borrowing its action both from Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, in which a young woman befriends a glamorous older couple, and from Lucie’s most famous bit of writing.
Ayad understands the story Susan wrote as fiction, and unrelated to her ultimate fate: She has a breakdown of some sort, with a possible attempt at suicide. The other students in the workshop, however, see in the girl’s fiction a smoking gun. They know their professor is close with Lucie—the malevolent force in Susan’s story, and a woman famous for writing about her own sexual history—and a theory takes hold: What if the story isn’t made up, and what if Ayad is somehow complicit in covering up the truth? Speculation spirals, and I wish events didn’t feel so plausible. A rumor spreads on Reddit that Lucie had invited a student to dinner with “nefarious erotic designs.” This is how the hothouse of the internet works: From this anecdote we get to accusations of Satanic goings-on.
The Radiance is a novel that resists reader’s expectations, or at least mine—depicting a crime it’s not interested in solving, raising sexual intrigue but finding no particular charge there, getting at life in seminar rooms while not examining, too deeply, the students therein. Indeed, I found the students we do meet to conform to type, but maybe that’s right; one does meet, in real life, people troublingly like stock characters.
Still, I appreciate Akhtar’s willingness to leave readers with ambiguity. Life doesn’t wrap up neatly, so why should a novel? Early in The Radiance, Ayad tells of learning from his cousin that, as a boy, his father had been raped repeatedly over the course of one horrific night; Ayad’s uncle took him to the police, and then both boys were raped by those officers. Here is a story not of “nefarious erotic designs” and intimation but actual, unimaginable violence and violation. Does this experience explain Ayad’s uncle’s homosexuality, or his own father’s alcoholism; is it part of that “chain of linked actions” that gives fiction its verisimilitude? Or is life less like a story than we want to believe? While the task of the literature student is to explicate, perhaps the discovery of the fiction writer is that life, with its secrets, its violence, its illnesses, is inexplicable. Maybe that’s part of why we read novels: Real life, who needs it?
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