The Radiance

Written in the autofictional mode, with a narrator who shares the author's name and biographical details, the novel follows Ayad Akhtar, a Pakistani-American writer and playwright, through a radical inner transformation triggered by a near-fatal accident, and through the unraveling of his friendship with Lucie Neroponte, a brilliant, controversial professor whose relationship with a troubled student ends in crisis.

Ayad introduces Lucie, his neighbor in a quiet upstate New York town. Lucie published "Growing Pains," a provocative essay recounting her affair as a twenty-year-old University of Chicago student with her fifty-two-year-old professor, Richard. The essay became a sensation for its depiction of the affair as her triumph and his defeat. In 2019, while writing a book drawing from his own life, Ayad experiences unsettling encounters with the people he has been writing about and moves to a colonial house in the Hudson Valley. During the pandemic, he becomes part of the household "bubble" of Lucie and her husband, Stanford, a surgeon and poet.

In September, Ayad is struck from behind by a vehicle while cycling. His spleen ruptures. During surgery and a brief coma, he experiences a dislocation from his body: a timeless awareness accompanied by waves of intense pleasure. When he wakes, a luminous inner silence envelops him that does not fade. Lucie connects his experience to Dostoyevsky's descriptions of ecstatic auras preceding epileptic seizures; Ayad identifies the insular cortex, a brain region integrating sensation, emotion, and self-awareness, as the likely source. An MRI later confirms unexpected thickening in this region. His sexual desire vanishes entirely.

On a trip to New York, Ayad discovers his perception has changed. On the subway, he feels he is seeing not with his eyes but through his chest, perceiving strangers enveloped in distinct emotional atmospheres. At dinner with his recently divorced cousin Tanveer, he perceives her pain as her outer form. Tanveer tells him a devastating family secret: When his father was nine and his uncle Shahnawaz eleven, after the family moved to Peshawar in northern Pakistan, his father ran away to a bus station and was raped through the night by bus drivers. When Shahnawaz found his brother and told a police officer, the officer lured both boys onto a bus, where he and two friends raped them. Years later, Shahnawaz came out and tried to make amends, but Ayad's father could not bear it. After hours of weeping, Ayad and Tanveer step outside and he realizes he has never known what it meant to be alive.

The narrative traces Lucie's biography: her father Silvio's journey from Italian immigrant to a career at Charles Schwab, her mother Marike's escape from a Mennonite community, and Silvio's sudden death during Lucie's sophomore year, which led her into Richard's arms. When "Growing Pains" later embroils her in campus controversy, students protest, colleagues distance themselves, and her tenure is denied. Lucie's intellectual formation was shaped by Allan Bloom, the University of Chicago philosopher, through whom she absorbed the Platonic idea from the Phaedrus that the human soul is winged but earthbound, its wings capable of growing again when stirred by erotic beauty. This conviction animates her life.

Lucie recommends Ayad for a semester teaching position at her college, where he leads a seminar in autofiction. Susan Yi, Lucie's best student, is among the enrolled: intensely well-read and without a smartphone. Susan develops a story transparently modeled on Lucie and Stanford, centering an older writer married to a handsome Black doctor who invites a young woman to her home because she believes her husband will find the visitor attractive. Ayad does not reveal that he knows Lucie. In week four, Londyn, a talented senior, accuses Ayad of steering the discussion toward having the protagonist sleep with the Black husband and calls the racial dynamics racist. After class, Londyn reveals troubling information: Susan has been passing confidential details from Title IX proceedings, the college's federal sexual-misconduct investigations, to Lucie. Lucie, in turn, has been interfering in a separate case involving one of her own advisees accused of assault.

Meanwhile, Officer Billie Lawson investigates the hit-and-run. Paint from Ayad's bike matches a Diamond Black Ram 1500 pickup. When Billie mentions the white-supremacist number 1488, tattooed on her radicalized cousin Jake's knuckles, Ayad recalls seeing the number on the truck's tailgate. Billie identifies the owner as a handyman, whom Ayad calls Alexander, whose son was killed in Afghanistan. Driven by dreams, Ayad finds Alexander at his son's grave, tells him he knows Alexander hit him, and thanks him, saying the accident was the best thing that ever happened to him. Alexander crumbles, weeping; Ayad feels his anguish as his own.

That same day, Ayad is struck by suicidal thoughts and a migraine, his first dark reversal since the accident. That night, Susan jumps into the frigid Hudson River and is pulled from the water by crew-team members. The university investigation reveals that Susan stopped taking her psychotropic medication, that her conversations with Lucie violated the code of conduct, and that Lucie's intervention in a Title IX case triggered complaints for retaliation. Ayad's class is canceled by student petition; his students believe he was protecting Lucie. Online, stills from a swingers' party video spread across social media, spawning conspiracy theories.

Ayad begins therapy with Dr. Talia Ozick, a psychiatrist in Connecticut who encourages him to stay curious about his experience rather than diagnosing it. She challenges what she calls Lucie's "narcissism," drawing parallels to Ayad's adoring relationship with his charismatic father.

Lucie visits and delivers an extended confession. Susan, she explains, made her feel necessary again as a teacher. She encouraged Susan to read Plato, give up her phone, and keep a notebook of desires. The night before Susan's suicide attempt, Lucie rummaged through Susan's bag and found dialogues in which a character named LUCIE cruelly berates a character named SUSAN. Lucie recognizes this voice as Susan's internalized version of her abusive mother. As Lucie speaks, Ayad perceives her with sudden clarity: weak, not weaker than anyone else, but unreconciled to her weakness.

In the weeks after the accident, Ayad also develops somatoparaphrenia, a condition in which a limb feels as though it does not belong to oneself. His left side feels alien, and he becomes convinced it belongs to Lucie. The significance crystallizes when Shahnawaz reveals, over dinner in New York, that Ayad's father was originally left-handed. After the abuse in Peshawar, the boys' mother beat Ayad's father until he stopped using his left hand and eventually tied it behind his back. That night, Ayad's left side throbs. He vomits tears in a savage, elemental release. He wakes to an erection rigid with pain: Physical desire has returned. On the street, every passing body fills him with longing. The world is no longer luminous and unified; it is separate, achingly desirable, and full of need.

Arsonists, likely Jake, set fire to Lucie and Stanford's gardening shed and damage their back porch; headstones in the graveyard of the enslaved are defaced. Lucie moves to Italy; Stanford sells the house; the college president is ousted. Ayad's luminous states fade as his insular thickening partially reverses. He begins having sex again and meets a woman named Anne, with whom pleasure takes on a subtler, lingering quality. The artist from whom he sublets returns, and Ayad leaves the country house. He writes the account that becomes the book itself.

The novel ends in France after Tanveer's wedding to a man named Guyon. Ayad visits Chartres Cathedral alone. In the underground crypt, amid candlelit silence, he recognizes a tattoo on the wrist of a young nun in a blue habit. She turns, and he sees it is Susan. He whispers her name; a sister beside her lifts a finger to her lips. The nuns rise and process into the darkened hall. Ayad hopes Susan will turn one last time, so he can shape some understanding from her look. She does not turn. And then she is gone.