By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

Reviewer: Alan Chin

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pages: 238

Peter and Rebecca Harris seem to have it all. Midforties, denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, and within reach of the pinnacle of their careers in the arts—he’s a dealer at a second-tier gallery, she’s an editor at an art magazine. They own a fashionable loft, have a daughter in college who’s living with an older woman, enjoy influential friends, and Peter has an opportunity to take on a hot artist who will catapult his gallery into that sought-after first tier. Could life be any sweeter?

Then Rebecca’s younger brother comes for an extended visit. Ethan (given the pet name Mizzy, “the mistake”) is a handsome, beguiling, mid-twenties drifter with a history of drug problems. He is looking for direction, and Rebecca and the rest of her family is determined to help him “straighten out his life.” But rather than helping Mizzy find himself, Peter begins questioning his own career, his marriage, even his sexuality. Suddenly, Peter’s carefully constructed world doesn’t seem so appealing.

Much like his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, Cunningham takes a sober look at how modern society lives. He masterfully contrasts a responsible, ambitious, serious couple with a carefree, manipulative, playboy. It is a story that resonates, that forces the reader to think long and hard about what is important in life, and how we choose to live and love.

The epigraph Cunningham chose for this work is a line from Rilke's "Duino Elegies": "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror." It gives us the all-encompassing theme: the pursuit, use, and misuse of beauty destroys.

Like many of Cunningham’s novels, this story has plenty of gay content without becoming a “gay novel”. It has universal themes that everyone can relate to.

I’ve not always connected with Cunningham’s work, but this novel captivated me. It is perhaps not of the same brilliance as The Hours, yet it certainly shines bright as a triumphant work. The prose is always spot on and a delight to read. The characters are real, flawed, and absorbing. The story resonates with frustrated desires and unfulfilled needs. Bravo.

http://www.michaelcunninghamwriter.com/

The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Reviewer: Alan Chin

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1999

Pages: 226

In 1920’s London, Virginia Wolf’s rebellious spirit is fighting against her madness as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. Two decades later, a young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious coy of Mrs. Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan roams Greenwich Village in 1990’s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying poet.

Moving across the decades and between England and America, this novel intertwines the stories of three unforgettable heroines, refracted through the prism of a single day. Cunningham brings these women’s lives together in a creative way, and with rare skill.

Thought I am not an enthusiastic fan of Cunningham’s other novels, I can sum The Hours up in one word: Brilliant.

Cunningham paints vivid portraits of three women in three distinctly different times and settings. Their lives resonate with association as Cunningham explores the ideas of duty, sexuality, aesthetic creativity, the boundaries between sanity and madness, and suicide. 

The prose shimmers with the grace of a ballet. The connections between the three storylines are both subtle and powerful. The author has produced a work that can only be regarded as high art.  It is moving, intelligent, and unforgettable. It has a number of gay characters and touches on gay themes without being a gay story.

This is my third reading, and I’m sure I’ll continue to return to it again and again.

 http://www.michaelcunninghamwriter.com/