In 1977, French writer Serge Doubrovsky released his novel “Fils,” unleashing a new subgenre on the literary world. It was not quite a memoir, autobiography or novel — Doubrovsky called it “autofiction.”
“Autofiction” is ambiguous, but it’s vaguely what it sounds like: a piece of fiction but “of events and facts strictly real.” According to Penguin UK, titles like Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” or Karl Ove Knausgård’s “A Death in the Family” qualify as examples of modern autofiction. “Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust is an earlier example, predating Dubrouvsky and suggesting he has named a literary tradition that existed long before him.
Autofiction has proved to be a genre used by writers hailing from all over and writing about all sorts of things — including the Vietnamese American Vuong, Norwegian Knausgård, French Marcel Proust and Doubrovsky and, most recently, Pakistani-American author and playwright Ayad Akhtar.
“The Radiance” is Akhtar’s third novel following “Homeland Elegies” (2020) and “American Dervish” (2012). “The Radiance” also precedes the author’s extensive list of plays, including “Disgraced,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Though “The Radiance” is formally a novel, it is also, as its section titles suggest, an “Investigation into Autofiction.” From the very start, the novel blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction. It opens with a nebulous voice declaring that what follows is “a record of altered perception.” The novel’s interpretation hinges on this ambiguity. We can’t help but wonder how much of this is true.
“The Radiance” is full of these kinds of unresolved mysteries, along with lawsuits, wrongdoings and even miracles. It begins when the novel’s protagonist — coincidentally named Ayad Akhtar — moves to a “quiet upstate town,” kicking off the novel’s dramatic events. Soon after his arrival, the writer is the victim of a vicious hit-and-run while biking, suffering a head injury that rapidly transforms his perspective on the world. The experience causes him a spiritual awakening, or perhaps a spiritual crisis, that guides the story’s remaining events. He recalls an “oily ease in being,” resembling thought, which was “elusive, wordless: a surfacing of mental images, bleached like photo negatives overexposed to the point of erasure.”
Alongside him — as in, both Akhtars, the writer and the narrator — we too experience the “oily ease” of gliding along in an excellent story. Akhtar readily invites us into his glistening web to watch him spin it. After all, he says that “convincing fiction” is “a chain of linked actions — believable to the extent they were seen as probable, absorbing to the extent they were felt as necessary.” He goes as far as to explain his use of autofiction and make a meta-commentary on how he “wanted to focus on the fiction in autofiction,” giving us a peek into his artistic process. Fittingly, fictional Akhtar teaches a university class on autofiction. Likewise, this book is Akhtar’s masterclass in the genre, and we witness his vivid and vulnerable revelations.
Beyond his newfound thoughtfulness, his biking accident also gives the protagonist the ability to see “with [his] chest” rather than with his eyes. What he sees is spectacular color, light, and form, combining to create a unique radiance. It emanates from love and life, “all light trying to get through,” but it radiates especially from people, becoming “imbued with incandescent tenderness, scaled to the proportions of the heart that [holds] it.” This is “The Radiance”: the spiritual revelation that “we are not the names” but “the radiance” itself.
Akhtar’s novel urges us to look up from our phones, which he often complains about, and notice the unique light that they can’t reproduce. We can train ourselves to notice the fissures from which the light seeps in. We can look at a book and notice how it radiates.
The only significant place I considered “The Radiance” to falter was in its apparent inability to connect all of its broken threads. It felt as though not every piece made it into the final woven project. It seems more likely now that Akhtar used the lack of resolution as a tool. A part of the “pain” that is “the price for … disclosure.” As he writes, it is wrong to confuse these spiritual symbols — whether a book or a radiance — with “the promise of a cure.”
I may be looking back at my phone now, but for 304 absorbing pages, Ayad Akhtar surely had me noticing “The Radiance.”
