Ayad Akhtar with Robert Downey Jr.: The Radiance

Robert Downey Jr. joins Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ayad Akhtar for an onstage conversation about The Radiance, Akhtar’s daring, propulsive new novel about a man remade by a near-fatal accident.

The two met when Downey made his Broadway debut in Akhtar’s play McNeal, and their working relationship quickly developed into a real friendship. Downey has said of Akhtar: “He’s the most collaborative super intelligence you’ll ever come across — and every so often he’ll flare, and remind you he can break the sound barrier if he wants to. I get chills from that.”

Join two friends for an electric evening discussing Akhtar’s new novel, which follows a writer, also named Ayad Akhtar, who is nearly killed in a hit-and-run while riding his bike on a country road. He wakes from a coma subtly but utterly changed: the world now floods in with an intensity he has no framework for and can’t switch off.

Back on campus, his altered consciousness collides with the politics of identity, the orthodoxies of 21st-century campus culture, and a charged bond with a charismatic colleague. All the while, the question of what happened on that road haunts the narrative: is the narrator waking up, or coming apart? Akhtar holds us, riveted, reaching alongside his narrator for something just beyond the edge of what Mary Gaitskill, describing the book, called the “ineffable.” At once a page-turning campus drama and a genuine inquiry into transcendence, The Radiance asks what an awakening could mean now, and where, in a disenchanted world, a person might still find one.

Expect a freewheeling hour on creative risk, friendship, and the search for radiance in ordinary life.