New West Book Review

Frat Boy in a War Zone: Michael A. FitzGerald’s “Radiant Days”

By Jenny Shank, 5-22-07

Radiant Days
By Michael A. FitzGerald
Shoemaker & Hoard
246 pages, $15

In his debut novel Radiant Days, Idaho-based writer Michael FitzGerald explores the classic theme of Americans abroad through his narrator Anthony Sinclair, a dissolute former frat boy turned San Francisco dotcom worker who follows a beautiful Hungarian woman into the heart the war-torn former Yugoslavia in the mid-‘90s.  FitzGerald, who has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, recently won an Idaho Commission on the Arts fellowship.  Like many of his literary predecessors, Anthony Sinclair is an innocent, but he isn’t as intelligent or canny as Graham Greene’s naïve CIA operative Pyle in The Quiet American, or as blameless as Henry James’ Daisy Miller.  Like those characters, however, Anthony’s misadventures abroad involve a blend of sexual and political escapades.  Anthony explains himself in this way: “I might be a dunce.  I might miss references.  I know on the outside my most obvious characteristic is my averageness.  I only speak one-and-a-half languages.”

At the beginning of the novel, Anthony, an aspiring novelist, is working in the dotcom industry.  FitzGerald writes, “Any capable person who showed up in San Francisco after 1994 with artistic aspirations was ruined.  There were simply too many jobs.  If you could draw a straight line in sand, you were hired on as an interface designer.  All the would-be painters became graphic designers.  The writers found themselves ‘developing’ content.” Anthony finds himself adrift after a break-up with a girlfriend, and when a beautiful bartender named Gisela invites him to return to Hungary with her to find her missing son, he brushes off his San Francisco life as if it were dust and hops on a plane.

Anthony is just looking for a good time, but the problems of the people he encounters in Budapest often thwart his quest for debauchery and sexual conquest.  Gisela turns out not to be searching for a son, but instead running a shady international adoption brokering business, facilitating transactions that may or may not be beneficial for the children involved, in order to fuel her drug habit.  Anthony meets up with Marsh, a 24-year-old British war correspondent, who has all the knowledge of global affairs that Anthony lacks, but cannot drive a car.  Through dialogue with Marsh, FitzGerald is able to offer some more perspective on the geopolitical setting of the novel than Anthony is able to offer.  When Marsh insists that Anthony drive him to a newly-emerging front in the Balkan war, Anthony makes a blunder that has dire consequences.

In some ways Anthony is a monster, a depiction of how American carelessness can bring harm to the rest of the world.  Anthony’s experiences are so far removed from those of the people he meets in Europe that he relates to them almost as an alien; at one point he talks to a Croatian man about the men he has killed, and Anthony tries “to picture my fraternity brothers and me killing some guys from another fraternity.” At times Anthony takes a stab at introspection, but his thoughts always come around again to his own selfish desires, as in this passage when he thinks about the dress Gisela is wearing:

“I looked closer at the prints on her dress.  The factory outside Hong Kong where elderly women stood at the machines doing whatever weird and menial task it was that created and dyed that flower print.  The factory next to that factory where blow-up dolls are made.  I mean, yes, of course, it sucks that these people have to live in a decrepit beach resort with three hundred other people.  Yes, it sucks that their husbands and sons were most likely dead in some mass grave in a nondescript ravine deep in a nondescript patch of forest in a nondescript piece of countryside.  But how does it suck in my life?  I have pictures of them that will eventually get me laid.”

Yes, the world sucks, seems to be the only conclusion Anthony is ultimately able to draw from his time abroad, and he emerges relatively unscathed from adventures that have irrevocably harmed others.  In “Radiant Days,” Michael FitzGerald has succeeded in crafting a singularly unsympathetic narrator whose escapades straddle the uncomfortable line between comic and callous behavior.  Anthony is guaranteed to get under a reader’s skin, and his characterization seems an entirely accurate contemporary addition to the long literary tradition of American innocents abroad.

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