The Radiance
Is this a campus comedy? A novel of ideas? A medical mystery? A spiritual quest narrative? Yes, sure. All of it. And a lot more, packed into less than 300 pages. But also: Who cares? Taxonomy is taxidermy. Whatever this book is, it’s alive ... The campus novel parts of The Radiance, toggling between satire and melodrama, trembling at the crossroads of ambition, learning and lust, are at once queasily suspenseful and somewhat familiar ... Ayad the narrator tries, in earnest and in vain, to stake out a demilitarized zone on the culture-war battlefield he has stumbled onto. Akhtar the author, though, is conducting a stealthy psyop aimed at detonating the certainties of combatants on both sides.
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It’s all a lot. And look, I know that autofiction can be a tough sell for readers, as can pages of erudite dialogue, not to mention descriptions of the ineffable. And yet “The Radiance” is one of the most purely entertaining and fascinating novels I’ve read in ages. Akhtar plays with form and wrestles with big ideas in a way that somehow avoids the pretension that so often accompanies such experiments ... Above all, the book is vivid, often funny, and genuinely affecting. The story is mysterious, even puzzling, but it’s not a puzzle that Akhtar is forcing us to solve. Rather, this is a book that tickles the mind and, in its best moments, soothes the soul.
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The Radiance frequently takes on the pace of convalescence: slow, episodic, receptive to sudden revelation, and long intervals in which almost nothing appears to happen ... The contemporary campus has generated so much discourse about itself that fictional students arrive pre-pilloried. Akhtar seems aware of the problem but can’t always escape it ... The students are given so little life beyond their identities that the distinction between Ayad’s condescension and the novel’s becomes difficult to sustain. If Akhtar can see the cage, he doesn’t seem interested in shaking it ... Akhtar has written a book obsessed with interpretation, populated by professors, students, doctors, lawyers, and writers committed by profession to meaning-making. But the damaged body keeps interrupting their explanations ... Akhtar so tenderly renders the beauty and ennui of being unsure of one’s own psyche and soma that I return to those passages regularly.
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