I first encountered Ayad Akhtar’s work when I saw his groundbreaking play Disgraced towards the end of its Broadway run at the Lyceum Theater in New York City and before it won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The night was electric, on-stage and off-stage. I attended the show with my older sister and together we witnessed and heard arguments over the show two blocks away from the theater, presumably from patrons like us, on our way to the subway station. I hadn’t heard that type of heated discussion over a play ever. The polemic on stage literally spilled to the streets.

But Akthar is not just a dramatist, he is also an accomplished novelist. His third and latest novel, The Radiance is a departure from his plot-driven Aristotelian dramaturgy. The main character, also named Ayad, gets into a near-fatal car accident in rural New York where he’s set to teach at a university, and this event upends how he views the world.…