Radiant Days (review)

Eighteen-year-old Merle is an art student in 1977, and her unconventional talent attracts the attention of her teacher, Clea, who engages her in a sexual relationship and steals her art, presumably to promote it and claim Merle as her protégé. Soon, however, Clea has broken up with Merle and she is left homeless and broke. She runs into Ted, a homeless man with unmatched guitar skills, who is rumored to have taught some of the greats, including Dylan himself, before self-destructing. Meanwhile, teenaged poet and enfant terrible Arthur Rimbaud, in his own time of 1870, runs away from his domineering mother but can find no shelter or respite in a Paris under siege. He too meets an unusual homeless man, and one fateful night the two teens inexplicably find themselves together on the streets of Georgetown, sharing their magic and leaving brilliant threads of influence that reach across time to change each other's art. In a plot that's clearly a homage to Rimbaud's influence on generations of writers, poets, artists, and musicians, the mythic elements, including Ted's resemblance to Orpheus, work significantly better than the plot itself, which doesn't cohere as well as it might. Merle's and Arthur's stories run closely parallel to one another, with Arthur's story drawn from his actual biography, but the intersections are far too brief to be narratively satisfying. The lyrical, imagistic language is a rare treat, however, for artistic teens who relish evocative metaphors, and the introduction to Rimbaud's work will appeal to the restless teen spirit longing to rebel against all that is banal.