Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A writer undergoes a startling transformation. The narrator of this discursive novel—named, like the author, Ayad Akhtar—has sublet a gray saltbox colonial in New York’s Hudson Valley where he hopes to write undisturbed. Instead, he finds himself beset by troubles—starting with a pickup truck that (deliberately?) runs him off the road while biking. Knocked out, he’s rushed to the hospital, where his ruptured spleen is removed, and he wakes from a postoperative coma to a radically altered consciousness that defies description—not that he doesn’t try (he’s a writer, after all). He experiences “a waxing current of fierce delight that waned only when I could no longer bear it, a pulverizing tide ringed with a blaze of self-awareness.” And, as he tells his neighbor, “I’mseeing this light, but it’s more like I’m feeling it—palpably. Or even like Ihear it.” Later, in what could be a bizarre case study by Oliver Sacks, he develops a “persistent sense of being divided along [his] midline”—with his left side belonging to someone else—a condition his neurologist calls somatoparaphrenia. Meanwhile, Akhtar’s aforementioned neighbor, Lucie Neroponte, embroils him in a crisis at the college where she’s a professor and recommends him to teach a semester of creative writing. Lucie is already a semicontroversial figure, thanks to an essay she wrote decades earlier about an undergraduate affair with her professor; now her questionable mentorship of a student, Susan Yi, will draw her and the narrator into a cancel-culture scandal—a subplot that feels rather shopworn. Along the way, the narrator detours to relate a horrifying sexual assault in his father’s past, the details of Lucie’s unorthodox upbringing, and the backstory of the man who likely struck his bicycle. Autofiction that never finds its center of gravity. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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Akhtar (Homeland Elegies) unfurls an intense and transcendent philosophical novel about the limits of words. It’s narrated by a successful Pakistani American novelist named Ayad Akhtar, who has recently moved from New York City to an “upstate town where it’s not uncommon to see a Confederate flag.” After he’s seriously injured in a hit-and-run, he discovers he’s been transformed by the near-death experience. For one, his libido is gone, freeing him to experience the pleasure of “inner transports,” as when, driving to the college campus where he teaches, his “body seemed to extend beyond itself... as if it were enlarged.” The only problem is, he’s having trouble translating the “wordless magic” of his condition, which is eventually diagnosed as “post-traumatic neuropsychiatric syndrome.” A local cop thinks Ayad’s the victim of an anti-Muslim hate crime and searches for the culprit, but Ayad is unconcerned about justice, as he confides to his friend and colleague Lucie, who inspires him to reflect on the value of platonic bonds such as theirs. The plot thickens after an attempted suicide by a student who had written about a relationship with a woman who resembles Lucie for Ayad’s autofiction class, but the story’s core, radiating with intelligence and sensuality, comprises Ayad’s attempt to make sense of the staggering changes in himself: “My identity as a writer was at stake. The experiences I was having were so central, so transformative—what did it mean that I couldn’t really find the words to convey their force?” This is profound. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group. (Sept.)

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Transformed by a near-death experience, a creative writing professor becomes fascinated by and drawn into a lurid campus scandal. Struck by a truck in an apparent hate crime, Ayed loses his spleen and his sex drive but finds new feelings of empathy, patience, and “visionary tenderness” as well as the occasional ecstatic hallucination; “Why I was feeling near-religious awe at the sight of a toilet bowl, I couldn’t say,” he muses. Tended to by his English department colleague, Lucie, and her surgeon-poet husband, Stanford, Ayed is awash in emotional intensity and increasingly enraptured by Lucie’s lustrous features and her personal epistemology, in which the intellectual and the erotic often intertwine. Could there be a neurological genesis for his feeling that Lucie is “exposing the wings of his soul?” But a messy relationship with star student Susan Yi reveals a darker side to Lucie, and sensationalized allegations spill into Ayed’s already tense creative-writing seminar, forcing a long-overdue reckoning with his own past. Akhtar (Homeland Elegies, 2020) probes his narrator’s lush interiority with psychological acuity and the deft deployment of autofictional and metafictional commentary. The result is a powerful campus novel for the post-pandemic years that asks big questions, as pressing now as they ever were, about the connections between pleasure, knowledge, spirituality, and the body.