Summit
Review by Walter Cummins
The Radiance is one of the most challenging novels I’ve encountered for quite a while. It delves into the complex inner mind of a character with the author’s name, Ayad Akhtar, telling of a crucial personal turning point in the guise of autofiction. But it also dramatizes a complexity of events, past and present, that have occurred outside the mind of the writer, all that Akhtar struggles to integrate with his inner mind. How do they interact? What is cause and what is effect? What do the joint complexities reveal about what it mean to be a human being whose inventive brain coexists within an external context of many other humans and all that happens to them?
What I was struggling to express in the opening paragraph duplicates the way each turn of the novel captivated me as I sought to grasp what was emerging about the above questions. I kept highlighting passage after passage as if each was giving me an answer. until I encountered yet another in the shift to the next section. Nothing holds still for Akhbar and the people around him as they are overwhelmed by events.
Serendipitously, in the midst of my puzzling a friend sent me an Emily Dickinson poem that helped with my attempts to solve the novel. Here’s the opening stanza:
The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and you - beside –
To rephase for The Radiance, is it that the autofictional brain is wider that all exists outside it?
A number of the novel’s sections have the term “Autofiction” in their titles, Akhtar underlining his fundamental use of the technique. But curiosity led me to see if I could find out how close the mind of the narrator was the actual Akhtar exploring his real thoughts rather than emulating, say, Philip Roth’s invention of a problematic fictional alter ego. The other part of my inquiry wondered if some or any of the novel’s characters and events actually existed or happened.
In a brief introductory note Akhtar calls the novel an “altered perception” and clarifies that he has “taken liberties fiction permits,” the changes and reshapings helping him obtain a better grasp on what happened. But he does not identify the sources for those reshapings. Of course, many novels are based on things that actually took place, something readers take for granted. It’s Akhtar’s claim of autofiction and the convincing nature of the people he creates that make the search more central to this novel.
Some readers may be aware that he taught at Bard College on the Hudson that has many similarities to the novel’s unnamed college. Its elderly president shares much with Bard’s recently retired president, including writing about Mozart. But what of Lucie, the mentally disturbed Susan, and others? Are they versions of actual people?
There does exist a source of evidence to help determine how close the Akhtar character is to Akhtar the man. He wrote an autobiographical essay for The Atlantic about the importance of his dreams in response to a mental crisis—“What Were My Dreams Trying to Tell Me?”
At age twenty he was lost, sensing a hole inside him, then discovered the potential of dreams, particularly the illumination of what he calls a sense of soul: “I found in the use of soul a capaciousness that not only accounted for this richer relationship to others and the world—and to myself—but served as a bridge to deeper mystery, and to a new patience that allowed me to acclimate to it.” He goes on to say, “The webbed, protean mode of associative thinking—one thing reaching for another, in opposing vectors at once—was less an effort than a reflex, more instinctive than the ordinal fixity of my usual habits of mind.” As a writer he develops a deeper empathy for “the inscrutable boundlessness of the inner life.”
The insights noted in this essay are inseparable from the inner life of the Akhtar revealed and developed in The Radiance, especially his capacity for associative thinking that leads him to insights far beyond conscious analysis. One of the most important is what happens in his mind after his bicycle is struck by a truck on a backroad. Rather than pain or anger his illumination is the source of the novel’s title that becomes the standard for all that happens to him.
Lying on the road he experiences a “subtle pleasure”: “Above and behind me was a different radiance—not the dazzling, forward slant of time, but the upright brilliancy of a timeless present.” Yet, a physician’s diagnosis of an MRI suggests a physical cause of auras, one that further thinking associates with the auras of Dostoyevsky’s epileptic moments. Is the sense of radiance the function of a brain abnormality or a true vision?
Akhtar explores the possibilities in his intense sessions with the psychiatrist Talia Ozick. Her advice, which he calls an exhortation, to stay curious changes the way he contemplates his inner life: “And what I started to find was that this pain could become a doorway to an abjection as wondrous as it was oppressive and one I could experience only by not trying to make better sense of it. And what I started to find was that this pain could become a doorway to an abjection as wondrous as it was oppressive and one I could experience only by not trying to make better sense of it.”
The many references to figures like Dostoyevsky and Mozart and the deep learning of central characters are attributes of an academic novel. The life of the mind, some exceptional, is fundamental to the characters, but so is what might be designated the life of the loins for all of the sexuality crucial to the teachers’ past and the students’ present. Lucie’s essay about a long ago affair and Susan’s story for Akhtar’s creative writing class that led to her suicide attempt culminate in campus protests and the downfalls of central characters. Ironically, both the essay and the story draft can be considered autofictions. Events of the world under the sky overwhelm the brain.
In the final pages of the novel, caught up in the political chaos of the present, Akhtar has lost the sense of radiance but hopes that his writing about the experience will make the feeling come alive for others. At the very end, in the crypt of Chartres Cathedral he encounters the Susan whose actions were the source of the upheavals that also shook the lives of others. She fails to acknowledge his existence as if she has chosen to leave behind the world of her past and the people in it. It’s Akhtar who is left to exist in that world and write about it and, perhaps, recapture all that he felt in his effort to relate the outer to the inner.
