Akhtar, the narrator of The Radiance, mirrors the book’s author closely in his life. He moves from New York to a small Hudson Valley town before being struck by a pickup truck while riding his bike. When he regains consciousness after falling into a coma, he finds that everything appears lit from within, silent, and that he has become impotent.
After a night during which his cousin Tanveer disclosed a shocking truth concerning his father, the light has grown dimmer. A call from Lucie Neroponte, a friend who works at a nearby college, now arrives bearing a proposal for employment.
Lucie’s Call
Akhtar and Lucie both had worries about teaching, but their concerns were very different. Lucie’s stemmed from eros — an essay about her affair with her own professor when she was twenty made her name. Akhtar, on the other hand, feared that the security of an academic job would dull him as a writer.
Early Theater
Akhtar found humiliation a reliable teacher. The impersonal audience of a paying crowd corrected him. Jokes that didn’t work, story threads that didn’t track — he learned from all of it. Mid-show walkouts and anemic applause stung, but not so much that he couldn’t improve. His skits and plays got better.
A position with health coverage, retirement benefits, and modest pay was offered to him. He feared what he might give up by seeking security against the enforced meeting with listeners. Working before paying crowds without any safety net, he decided, was the path he must take.
“discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
The Summer in St. Louis
The journey ahead would be long and difficult. Through endurance alone, Akhtar found his footing, drawing strength from the audiences that guided him. That single lesson — the worth of crowdsourced wisdom — was the only one he felt fit to impart when he took up teaching young playwrights at a university in St. Louis.
The season saw Michael Brown killed, and not far away, Ferguson was burning. Akhtar took up lodgings near Dred Scott’s resting place, within easy reach of campus. Two days out of every week, he made the trip by bus to a shadowy chamber no bigger than the table where he and his pupils read their writings aloud together.
A Weakness Exposed
The answers remained hard to grasp without an audience present. Akhtar kept running into how little he truly understood about his own work. His closing words amounted to a plea disguised as an apology.
“My weaknesses as a teacher,” he explained, “were perhaps best seen as extensions of my strength as a writer: my trust in the public.” He urged them to dispense with the class critiques and get their work in front of paying crowds. The paying part was essential. Our art was not a gift but a form of commerce. To know the audience’s truth, he told them, it had to feel owed pleasure for what it had paid.
The Offer Arrives
Over six years after that dark and miraculous evening with Tanveer, Lucie got back in touch a mere month later to ask whether Akhtar would care to teach an orphaned creative writing section at the college. He was taken aback by his own eagerness to accept, and even more so by how quickly he admitted it.
“I’m so de-cathected I’ve got nothing better to do than take up the thing you complain about all the time.”
The Section and Its Troubles
The section was a seminar in autofiction. Lucie said the original instructor, a memoirist Akhtar admired, was in the hospital after what sounded like a mental breakdown. Lucie wasn’t supposed to know, which meant Akhtar wasn’t supposed to know either.
“I hope she’ll be okay,” Akhtar said.
“Did you read her last memoir? About her Hashimoto’s?”
“I thought it was great.”
“My guess? She’ll get a memoir out of this too.”
The President’s Interest
Lucie informed the president that Akhtar appeared bored lately and that there was a chance he might consider it. She told him directly that Akhtar had seemed bored lately and that there was a possibility he would be willing to listen.
“And still dealing with some trouble… down there?” Lucie asked, referring to Akhtar’s urological issue — no nerve damage; the doctor believed the problem was psychological.
“De-cathected?” she guessed.
The Final Reversal
“If it gets you to try something new, it’s a good thing, right?” Lucie said. She put Akhtar in touch with Mischa, the college president, who wanted to meet — and warn Akhtar not to fuck students.
“Bored?” Akhtar asked.
“Am I wrong? You’re still not writing.”
“I’m not.”
“And still dealing with some trouble… down there?”
The joke is finished. Akhtar, who used to claim that teaching would make him dull, has taken the job now because he’s bored and powerless. He confesses it to Lucie, who laughs at the contradiction.
A quiet, funny twist on his own argument — a reminder that the very thing you rail against may be precisely what you require.
Key Facts
– Narrator: Akhtar (shares name with the book’s author)
– Incident: struck by pickup truck while biking in a small Hudson Valley town
– Essay: Lucie’s account of her affair with her professor, written at age twenty
– Section: orphaned creative writing seminar in autofiction
– Original instructor: hospitalized after a mental breakdown
– President’s warning: not to fuck students
Verbatim Quotes
“discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” — James Baldwin
Source material: “The Radiance,” Literary Hub.
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