Review by Mary Kat

Rating: 😻😻😻 /5

Recommend for: literary readers wanting to explore philosophical ideas on the duality of self, those interested in current campus cultures and teacher-student dynamics, people looking to feel half-stoned from a reading experience

INTRO

The Radiance by Ayad Akhtar is about a college teacher and writer, also named Ayad Akhtar, who experiences a radiant shimmering around people after being hit by a truck and discovers new-found compassion towards others. As the novel unspools, a campus drama also ensues, as a fellow colleague finds herself in hot water over a friendship with a student.

SPOILERS AHEAD! CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

All The Best

The book does capture some pretty neat descriptions of the physical sensations of what an enlightenment may feel like. Although the writer never calls it enlightenment, that’s what my understanding of his experience was. He has a moment of glimpsing the humanity in others and feels their emotions directly. He imagines others’ back stories with details that move him to tears. I do think there are genuine moments of insight described here which is pretty impressive and interesting to read. Many of these experiences feel too incomprehensible to translate into words, but when the book hits, it does well.

These experiences are the most compelling parts of the book, but it ultimately takes a backseat to the campus drama and the protagonist loses access to his ability to see the humanity of others. It is ultimately a satori, a brief moment of grace that is not sustained. The lack of ongoing engagement, and the lack of understanding of this experience, is disappointing as a reader.

The Rest

We spend a huuuge amount of time exploring the protagonist’s colleague and friend named Lucie, a female professor at the college who teaches writing but seems to be fed up with a current culture of complaining and entitlement. This idea to me is super boomer. This whole description felt stale and unoriginal. We get it, the oldies don’t think the Millenials and Gen Zers work hard. I don’t think it’s interesting to read all that again, but with a bloated, high-falutin attitude.

More egregiously, the book does not convince us that Lucie is anything special. The whole book is built on the premise that Lucie is someone incredible that awakens others souls, in part responsible for the writer’s enlightenment. We are told this, but I never saw compelling evidence of this. What does Lucie do, besides seem to have multiple relationships that are transgressive and inappropriate? That alone does not convince of one’s unique intrigue.

The college drama rather crumbles without the centering of a compelling, convincing character in Lucie.

I will also try not to hold autofiction against the book, since that is the premise. But I am a bit over the craze of autofiction, which sometimes comes across as egotistical and unimaginative in other books. But I think the autofiction is relatively well-delivered here.

The book also feels so specifically of its moment of writing that it already feels out of date by the time it’s published. There are allusions to highly specific events (e.g. “the night after our once-and-future president was nearly killed in a cornfield”) that feel dated. As we leave the Trump era, I suspect this will feel even less relatable, as the book is so of a specific cultural moment.

Yay or Nay?

A relative meh and nay for me. I picked up this book because I was curious about the “radiance”, the titular experience that leads to the protagonist’s heart-opening. I love a Buddhist revelation as much as the next person. But this experience is left poorly understood and gradually fades into the background. The newly discovered compassion seems to be inconsequential without meaningful effects on the protagonist’s relationships. Instead, the story shifts to focus more on the campus drama, which felt out-of-touch, irrelevant and far less interesting to me.

Ultimately, a half-baked wanna-be enlightened reading experience that leaves the reader largely unsatisfied. Man discovers empathy, but then remembers self-possession again.

Verdict

There are a lot of cool ideas here from religion, philosophy and literature, but the book feels half-baked. Lots of potential, but ultimately landed with a mess of ideas without a coherent through-line. The book ultimately did not deliver on understanding the meaning of the protagonist’s experience, or how it all related together to the campus drama.

Quotes

“I confided in Lucie first, though no until two weeks after surgery, once I went back home, and once it was clear the enveloping, luminous silence into which I’d awoken in the hospital — a quiet more haptic than aural, as if every nerve ending in my body were consumed with silent smoldering — could no longer be dismissed as the aftereffect of anesthesia.”

The descriptions of a vibrating silence are quite powerful, although I often found the cadence of the sentences quite grating. As above, the sentence is laden with unimportant interrupters that bury the genuine insights to the end.

“A default setting called “me”: self-separating, self-justifying, a fiction wrapped in my name and facts, a lie both merry and miserable whose incessant self-chatter I began to hear like nails on a chalkboard as the postaccident quiet deepened its roots further into the subsoil of my life.”

I find these moments of selflessness interesting, although they are short-lived and without real sustained change to the protagonist’s life. (The protagonist does show grace to the driver who hit him with the car, but that scene and interaction is so surreal that it feels unrealistic.)

“Time was a picture. In that picture, I ceaselessly sought the image I took myself to be — a self that might succeed or fail… Above and behind me was a different radiance — not the dazzling, forward slant of time, but the upright brilliancy of a timeless present.”

I would have loved more exploration of what this means, and how it might affect the protagonist’s vision for his life, rather than diverting from these mysterious ideas back to a mundane school conflict. I mean, this description is wildly unique and I would love to know about what it means. So much potential!

What to Check Out Next

Trip by Amie Barrodale, another totally weird book about the collision of self and no-self in misadventures