5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

Our fivesome of fantastic reviews this week includes, Zain Khalid on Ayad Akhtar’s The Radiance, Franklin Schneider on MrBeast and James Patterson’s The Most Dangerous Games, Jason Mott on T. Geronimo Johnson’s The Occidental Book of the Dead, Sam Worley on Barbara Kingsolver’s Partita, and Joe Moran on Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

The university offers the novelist a prefabricated sociology: different generations, classes, ideologies, and institutions conveniently compressed in vitro, in seminar rooms, where everyone can be assigned a representative grievance before being permitted the inconvenience of ambiguity or personhood. Ayad Akhtar’s new novel, The Radiance, sometimes succumbs to this temptation. Its students arrive morally outraged, a priori puritans, while its professors are enervated and dissatisfied.

Its narrator, however, has suffered an accident no one can adequately explain, least of all the author. Whenever the novel returns to his damaged body and escapes campus life, it becomes beautifully quixotic. Bureaucracy can be one of fiction’s great subjects.

Kafka got quite a bit of mileage out of paperwork. But bureaucracy requires transformation: comedy, terror, absurdity, erotic charge, something that imbues institutional language with human life. The Radiance occasionally reproduces the exhausting proceduralism it means to examine.

The reader takes on the role of a defendant in an HR investigation, obliged to absorb every detail. His effigy of Gen Z clashes with much of what has emerged in recent years. For example, the student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun whose reporting on an alleged gang rape and demands for institutional accountability offer a bracing corrective to Akhtar’s portrait.

In reality, these students can properly scrutinize their universities, which, much like Akhtar’s narrator, perceives them solely as threats or clients. Conversely, the narrator’s body keeps supplying experiences that resist any adjudication. The tension between intellectual certainty and its corporeal obverse is the novel’s most interesting possibility, yet its campus plot repeatedly narrows into a question of who deserves our sympathy.