A martini with Ayad Akhtar, the novelist remaking autofiction for the social media age

It’s not easy to categorize Ayad Akhtar. This, he might tell you, is precisely the point. On the one hand, he’s a celebrated playwright, recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in drama for “Disgraced.” On the other, he’s the author of three novels — two of which, 2020’s “Homeland Elegies” and the just released “The Radiance,” blur the line between fact and fiction in vivid and provocative ways. When we meet, over a drink at the Oyster Bar in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, I admit I’m not sure what to call these books, which is one reason I find them compelling. Akhtar laughs as he takes a sip of wine. “I think that’s right,” he says. “I think there is something about voice that is primary. And it’s voice that drives the work.”

In part, that’s because both “Homeland Elegies” and “The Radiance” are narrated in first person, which means voice is the most essential tool Akhtar has to create character. But even more, it’s because of the chances he takes, in both content and form. “The Radiance” begins in the aftermath of a hit and run, its narrator hospitalized with a ruptured spleen and other internal injuries. He very nearly dies. “I’ve struggled for a few years now,” the character confides, “to understand the state I was in — or, rather, to describe it clearly in language.” This, of course, is the struggle faced by any narrator, fictional or otherwise. How do we translate, or transfer, experience into words? What is gained or lost in that exchange? In the case of “The Radiance,” such questions only grow more pronounced as we realize that — as in “Homeland Elegies” — the author and his protagonist share not only a first and last name but also the broad outline of biography and career.

This is not to say that either book is autobiographical — or not exactly. There are more complicated resonances at stake. One is a desire to reflect a polyphonic approach to narrative. “I’ve been thinking,” Akhtar tells me, “about the diminishing attention span of both myself and readers. The traditional three act structure — beginning, middle, end, set up a bunch of characters, set a world in motion, as in Dickens — doesn’t hold us in the same way anymore. So I’m looking for techniques to absorb readers differently, in order to do something complex and literary.”

To a certain extent, this has to do with time, multiple layers of which are activated in “The Radiance”: time as lived; as remembered; as annotated; as rendered into art. There are transcripts and asides and footnotes; references and internet memes. Such interventions also marked “Homeland Elegies,” where the Muslim American narrator — a writer, secular and non-observing — must confront a nation broken, or revealed, by the result of the 2016 presidential election. How to address that collapse, or dislocation? “I began to think,” Akhtar recalls, “of the book as a kind of Instagram. If you’re on Instagram, philosophical quotes and pictures of bikinis and recipes and landscapes and self-portraits and the hotel room you’re staying in, sunset … it all can coexist seamlessly. Also, the curation of the self is the central thematic motif on Instagram, so it seemed to fit.”

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And yet, barely six years later, we’ve slipped further through the looking glass. The illusion of reality, of the self, as somehow fixed, not fluid — it all seems quaint, if not naïve. “Even since ‘Homeland Elegies,’ ” Akhtar acknowledges, “something has changed in our attention. Social media narrative has become more attenuated. Instagram is no longer the right paradigm. TikTok is probably closer because there’s an immersion in the present, a presentism.”

As a consequence, “The Radiance” opens outward, like an expanding universe in which “you get the whole story multiple times in different ways, whether legal briefs or monologues or indirection. That constant reframing, that defying of expectation, helps keep us in the present without letting up.”

Such an approach is absolutely necessary, for “The Radiance” is about nothing if not presence. In the aftermath of the hit and run, the narrator is touched by “a curious sense of simultaneous time … so at odds with the usual accrual of meaning in the daily mind.” Call it transcendental, the character’s deepening sense of luminosity, the way his empathy heightens as his consciousness expands. The experience, Akhtar notes, reflects that of Montaigne, who fell into a related sort of fugue state after having been thrown from a horse. So, too, Rousseau, who “was run over by a Great Dane, and for three hours, existed in a kind of complete and total … beatitude, I think, is the word he uses.” Beatitude, yes. Or, perhaps, a falling out of time. “Multilateral presence,” is how Akhtar chooses to explain it: “emotional, moral, experiential, medical, linguistic. And so, the formal challenges of the book were about rendering a story in time from the point of view of a narrator who seems to be experiencing, meaningfully, some kind of timelessness.”

On the surface, this may seem a formidable contradiction. In the first place, narrative cannot exist without time. Its aesthetic is that of revealing, in which one scene leads to another and then to another, each precipitated on what has come before. In the second, presence comes with its own burdens, its own discontents. Throughout the novel, Akhtar — or his alter ego — finds himself disturbed, almost despairing. “How do you go back to life after what you’ve experienced?” the author writes late in the novel. “How do you open up to someone else who has no idea what you’re talking about?” This is the conundrum at the center of the book. How to put into words, into language, that which cannot be described? As much as the narrator understands he’s undergone a psychic, if not spiritual, transformation, it doesn’t lead to reconciliation. If anything, it only sets him further apart.

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That tension only accumulates as “The Radiance” progresses, especially once the narrator begins teaching an undergraduate autofiction workshop at a campus in New York’s Hudson Valley — Bard, I’m imagining, although that’s not its name here — which is also where the author lives. As to whether or not he has actually taught such a course, it doesn’t matter, any more than if he were the victim of a hit and run. The point is to use these events, these disruptions, to interrogate our impulse to narrate, the way it separates us from the world. This is particularly the case with Lucie Neroponte, a friend and fellow teacher, notorious for having published an essay about her affair with a professor many years before. For Lucie, there is no space, or not enough, between the character on the page and her unmediated self.

Still, if she is unable to parse the difference, something similar might be said about every one of us. Hence, Akhtar suggests, his use of autofictional and extra-literary devices. Hence, his blurring of the lines. “We are always self-narrating,” he insists. “We are always trying to make the pieces add up.” It’s an argument he makes explicit late in the novel with a cascading five page paragraph that catalyzes the political and social divisions of the present by re-creating the dizzying down-the-rabbit-hole experience of an overheated Reddit thread.

The risk, of course, is in the timeliness. The risk, yes — but also the reward. “I always come back to Shakespeare,” Akhtar says, finishing his wine. “In 1606, Elizabeth is dead. James has ascended to the throne. There are three parts of the kingdom: Scotland, Wales, and England. Can they coexist? Shakespeare writes “King Lear,” in which a king divides his kingdom into three. Can they coexist? That’s the whole premise of the play.”

What Akhtar is describing is another kind of tension, perhaps the most crucial of them all. He’s describing what we might call narrative impulse, which remains inherent to humanity. “I feel,” he tells me, “like there’s no richer thing than literature. It reflects lived experience, it reflects history, it reflects language, it reflects mores. I don’t know another human discourse that has that kind of richness. I’m not sure there is one.” As to why this is, he continues, “it’s the interiority. The interiority of another being encapsulating their life. And all of their influences, all the way back to the Old Testament. Whatever that residue is — the texture of that residue — I want to work with it, because that’s the experience of being alive.”

Ulin is the former book editor and book critic of The Times.