In 2015, The Oberlin Review, the Midwestern college’s paper, reported on student dissatisfaction with the school’s dining service. It began as customer service complaints about a would-be banh mi (pulled pork and coleslaw on a ciabatta; I’d go to the media, too), but a student argued that the college’s contractor “has a history of blurring the line between culinary diversity and cultural appropriation by modifying the recipes without respect for certain Asian countries’ cuisines.” The New York Times picked up the story, using the headline “OBERLIN STUDENTS TAKE CULTURE WAR TO THE DINING HALL.” So began a fresh installment of a familiar cycle of outrage: The youth are coddled, their political correctness the true intolerance, their perspectives invalid or perhaps even dangerous.
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.
If campus politics are simply politics, a campus novel is ultimately just a book about contemporary American life. Ayad Akhtar’s The Radiance unfolds in the environs of a university in the vague territory of upstate New York, “where it’s not unusual to see a Confederate flag.” Akhtar understands what the Times doesn’t, that the dramas and travails of the righteous young are not that interesting. One character dismisses the entire academy thus: “They’re all about to find out what happens when you focus on the bullshit…. Students. Universities. The whole goddamn lot of them. And I won’t pretend to feel they don’t have it coming.”
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 horror movies, graveyards explain haunting. While this isn’t a horror novel, the titular radiance is a kind of possession. Ayad is riding his bike on a country road when he’s struck by a car: “I heard the improbable nearness of an engine, its sudden roar joined to the full-body shove that sent me soaring.” Ayad is left with a ruptured spleen and the strange mental dislocation that provides the title, a suite of odd symptoms of body and mind. The Radiance is a novel of the campus and, well, the hippocampus, exploring culture war skirmishes and sexual politics, and taking these as metaphors for a more profound sense of dislocation, a crisis that is either mental or spiritual in nature, afflicting American writers and teachers, or perhaps the whole nation—the real pandemic, an ongoing one.
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:
If it makes sense to say that what was remembering was my body, I should add that it was my left side that seemed to be doing the remembering. Just as I experienced my head less and less as the seat of my mind, so did the left side of my body now seem to have a mind of its own, bearing me along on an excavation of what I hadn’t known was forgotten.
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.
In that picture, I ceaselessly sought the image I took myself to be—a self that might succeed or fail. It was always a picture of the future, for the past was only a store of fragments from which to shape images of what I might still become. But the picture was an illusion, an invention of mind and will enslaved to the phantasm of pleasure—an escape that only yielded the very pain it sought to avoid. Nothing I saw in that picture was real. And: Above and behind me was a different radiance—not the dazzling, forward slant of time, but the upright brilliancy of a timeless present.
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.”
Another of the changes the narrator notes in himself is a newly intense attachment to Lucie; even this emotion manifests somehow on the left side of his body. It is refreshing for a campus novel to cast as its object of infatuation not a comely coed but a fellow teacher, and Ayad’s thing for Lucie is not a conventional, all-consuming, life-ruining passion. “It wasn’t love I was feeling …” he muses. “My feeling for Lucie was devoid of reaching, free of desire for anything beyond what I already had—right then, right there—the pleasure of her presence.”
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.
When we meet her, Lucie is jaded, her complaints about kids today familiar: “The phones changed everything fifteen years ago, and the pandemic’s made it so much worse. They’re all on medications for the brain rot—which bring their own set of issues. Most days it feels like I’m in a roomful of sedated toddlers.” Her students object to reading Percy Shelley: “Why am I assigning the work of someone who was clearly a sociopath and narcissist—whatever that means—and likely a serial rapist?”
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.
The tale contains innuendo, but nothing more. When the student comes to see Ayad in his office, she’s not concerned about questions of sex and power but faith and the divine. “Don’t you think it’s weird that we don’t ask it more?” she wants to know. “Why there’s something … instead of nothing? Heidegger knew that was the question. But Heidegger was a Nazi.” She’s plainly a young person in crisis.
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.
Nothing so outlandish happened between the professors and Susan in real life. Nevertheless, the drama costs Ayad his adjunct gig and undoes Lucie’s marriage and career—she flees the country and the academy, reinventing herself as a would-be food influencer. It would be funnier if it did not feel so believable.
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.
I delighted in Akhtar sidestepping the matter of whether his narrator’s bike accident was a hate crime; a less confident writer would have structured the whole novel around this. Rather, he builds a book around the question of psychic disturbance. It’s less compelling stuff than the prurient finger-pointing of the Susan subplot. One uncharitable but possible reading of Ayad’s disorder, feeling strange things on the left side of the body, implies something about the politics of the left that seems either silly or facile. The crisis, be it medical or spiritual, that Ayad is undergoing remained, for me, an abstraction. However effective a metaphor it might be for a broader sense of social and political dysregulation, I can’t help but want to know: Why this syndrome? The answer isn’t as tidy as a hit-and-run.
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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