Posts tagged Michael Cunningham

(Michael Cunningham, 2010)

I have to start with the fact that Michael Cunningham is my favorite author; I completely adore his previous novels Flesh and Blood and Specimen Days, as well as the one he’s most notable for, the Pulitzer Prize winning The Hours. His new one, By Nightfall, contains a lot of the elements that made the others endearing — the AIDS-afflicted gays, Manhattan, dramatic older women with a flare for style, and a sexy undercurrent of forbidden love. Cunningham’s style is to pull heavily from his own influences (Woolf & Whitman were some of his previous muses), but here he steps beyond literary art and looks to visual art for inspiration. By Nightfall centers around Peter Harris, a middle-aged art curator in New York City who struggles with a need to “measure up” — trying to find the next big artist, rebuilding a broken relationship with his daughter, saving his addict brother-in-law, and moving past the death of his older brother, among other things. Surrounded by the problems of the people in his life, Peter needs to find a way to address his own and it is in this struggle that Peter begins to analyze the depths of beauty and art, and the ways that each is ever-changing and dependent on the eye of the beholder.

So I’m a little biased and love this book simply because it’s a Cunningham, but I’d be a liar to say I wasn’t slightly disappointed with it. The plot of the novel, when present, is slow-moving and the ruminations on beauty & art become repetitive. The writing even becomes a little bit annoying during a few awkward asides where, as a reader, it isn’t clear whose voice is speaking to us and from what angle, is it Peter or Cunningham who has become burdened with insecurities of worth? It might not be far-fetched to guess that By Nightfall is actually a mask for Cunningham’s struggle to live up to the prize-winning name he’s made for himself. Is he really just asking us to forego immediate judgment on the value of his art, delaying any critique of each book’s individual beauty until they have withstood the test of time? Should we even care if we won’t be around to take a second look at it centuries from now? Whatever the answers, By Nightfall has its moments of tenderness, thoughtful intellect, and intrigue that make it as lovable as anything else he’s written, putting it in its place as a part of a larger body of work, artful in its collectiveness.

Recommended for fans — like a risky album from your favorite musician you’ll only enjoy it if you’re familiar with their other work, but don’t expect it to bring in any new admirers.

Notable excerpt:

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn’t look great at first, how often it didn’t look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it’s still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that’s survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.