Ayad Akhtar blurs fiction and reality in new novel, 'The Radiance'

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author has a new novel that explores big questions about states of being and the state of America today.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks with Ayad Akhtar for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: A writer named Ayad Akhtar who rides his bike on a rural road in Upstate New York and writes a story about a writer named Ayad Akhtar who rides his bike on a rural road and one day is hit by a pickup truck. What’s true? What’s fiction? What is a story anyway?

Ayad Akhtar, Author, “The Radiance”: What I’m really after is trying to find the reader where they are today. There is something about reality, the question of reality, that excites people in a way that fiction, the imagined, seems to be a little bit less adhesive.

So it’s an interrogation in the process of how you use your life to write stories.

Jeffrey Brown: The new novel is called “The Radiance,” a term describing the change in the way the imagined writer, victim of a hit-and-run, perceives the world in his own life and interacts with those around him, somewhere between an awakening and madness.

Ayad Akhtar: So the book really tracks that eight-month period where he is in this altered state.

Jeffrey Brown: He sees the world differently, feels the world differently. He sees his own inner world differently.

Ayad Akhtar: Totally. Everything is more vivid. Everything is lit up by a kind of radiance, if you will. I was looking for something that could begin to get at maybe what the experience of what we used to call the soul might be.

Jeffrey Brown: The soul.

Ayad Akhtar: The soul.

Jeffrey Brown: Big idea.

Ayad Akhtar: A big idea.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Ayad Akhtar: That sense of being inside your own experience and lit up in some way, but mysteriously.

ACTOR: I know they’re looking at me, so I figure, why not make it easier for everyone involved?

Jeffrey Brown: Akhtar is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright always ready to take on big ideas,but always grounded in thorny realities of our day. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2012 play, “Disgraced,” it was Muslim identity and religion in post-9/11 America.

And other plays and books have taken on large subjects in both subtle and overt ways, often picking up on aspects of Akhtar’s own life as a Pakistani American raised in Milwaukee, making his way as a writer who is both insider and in some important ways outsider.

In “The Radiance,” the duality is direct, as the character Ayad Akhtar teaches a course, Investigations in Autofiction, while the writer writes it.

Ayad Akhtar: The narrator is teaching a creative writing class where he is also talking with his students about story and about using their own lives to write stories.

Jeffrey Brown: So we have a character, Ayad Akhtar, and we have you, the writer, Ayad Akhtar.

Ayad Akhtar: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: And you’re playing with this idea of what?

Ayad Akhtar: Well, it seems increasingly that folks tend to read fiction and wonder what part of the fiction is based on the writer’s life. I think, especially when you’re writing an experience that feels like it might mirror the writer’s life, say, a Pakistani American narrator, and the writer is a Pakistani American writer, what aspect of this is real?

So I thought, let’s dispense with the with the charade and let’s just give him my name and many of the facts of my life, and then I can make stuff up, and then we will figure out, have a new relationship to this question of what’s real and not real.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s a novel of ideas, but it’s grounded in time, place, the now, contemporary America.

Ayad Akhtar: I mean, it has to be. If you’re going to talk about things that maybe are more permanent to our existence, they have to be nested in a concrete here and now. People want things. People are living lives that we recognize as lives today.

Jeffrey Brown: Indeed, the characters like Akhtar live in a rural area rife with political and class divisions.

Ayad Akhtar: He’s living in the country. He’s surrounded by, on one side of the state road. Trump-supporting anti-vaxxers and whatnot and, on the other side of the road, sort of folks who’ve moved in from the city who have coffee shops where they sell kale and whatnot.

Jeffrey Brown: These divisions that are very clear in our society.

Ayad Akhtar: Exactly. And so all of those political fault lines are part of the daily experience of those characters.

Jeffrey Brown: And the novel is set on a college campus with heightened tensions over what can be taught and by whom that mirror actual headlines today.

Why explore these kind of ideas you’re talking about, including the soul…

Ayad Akhtar: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: … on an American University?

Ayad Akhtar: Higher education. Higher education is the education in the higher things, at least in theory. It’s the place to ask the big questions, the biggest questions about God, about sex, about love, about meaning, about life, questions that may not have answers.

But the asking, the active pursuit in asking is enough of a meaning. And I think that maybe, maybe higher education has become a place where it’s a little bit less friendly to larger questions like that, just as it is less friendly in the culture at large to be asking larger questions like that.

Jeffrey Brown: In “McNeal,” his most recent play, Akhtar presented a renowned writer, played by Robert Downey Jr. on Broadway, turning to AI, another way into the questions of who is writing and what is real, clearly obsessions for the very real writer himself.

Ayad Akhtar: I think increasingly we are confronted by an informational environment where we don’t know what is concocted by AI or what is propaganda, what is point of view, what is advertising, what is discourse.

I think it’s an interesting opportunity for a novelist or for an artist, because I think that there is a higher standard of truth than just, is it objectively or documentarily true? Is it metaphorically true? Does it ring true? Does it feel true? And I think that’s ultimately a poetic truth that we’re after as artists.

And I think it’s an interesting — I’d like to think it’s an interesting way to try to get there.

Jeffrey Brown: The book is “The Radiance.”

Ayad Akhtar, thank you very much.

Ayad Akhtar: Thanks, Geoff.