Flesh And Blood by Michael Cunningham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Caveat: What follows is the review of a book that I originally read and reviewed in June, 2000. My thoughts and review of the book today, I think, would not be the same as they were sixteen years ago. However, since I have no intention of re-reading the book to provide an updated review, the following will have to suffice.


Flesh and Blood spans a long period of time in 466 pages--it begins in 1935 and concludes in 2035. Yet, the weight really settles in the middle years, a twenty year period between 1960 and 1980. The publishers claim that this is the story of three generations of Americans, beginning with Constantine, who as a child immigrates to America with his family, and concluding with his grandson. However, the plot more or less settles on the second generation, the children of Constantine and his Italian wife, Mary--Susan, Todd and Zoe--who grow up in the turbulence of the 1960s.

Within that twenty year period, the text concerns itself with the tensions between family members as each child grows into his own identity: Susan, a successful upper-middle class housewife; Todd, an insecure homosexual who struggles for confidence; and Zoe, a loose counterculture waif who bears a black child, then soon discovers she is HIV positive. These tensions originate in the compulsive behavior of Mary, the mother, and the angry violence of Constantine, who seems like a character who is derived straight from Steinbeck's East of Eden. Like those who live in Steinbeck's novel, the character's that populate Cunningham's world each tend to embrace an ideal future, sometimes clasping it, but often feeling alienated from their hopes and from themselves and from each other.

The strength of Cunningham's prose lay not so much in his characters or plot as it does in the exquisite imagery of his prose. A stylistic poetic flow undergirds each sentence, yet without heaviness. Some passages are extremely moving because of the wording itself, the impacted beauty of the language. We come not so much to care for the characters as we do for the aesthetic hot spots, points where paragraphs flow like waterfalls to form crystal and calm metaphorical pools by each segment's conclusion. The same effect is also achieved through use of simple symbols that are emotionally tied to the taut suggestions of desire. The stunning writing of Flesh and Blood, coupled with the emanation of unfulfilled appetites that arise from his characters, redeems the novel from thematic uncertainty and a plot that tends to fragment carelessly.

Hunger and lust is the central movement of Flesh and Blood, the material, bodily need for sustenance that transcends matter, the desire for love, for completion, for holiness. Often, Cunningham reveals this basic human need as his characters stumble through various, strange paths, to fill it, whether through sex, or through stealing inexpensive miscellaneous items, or through financial success, or through finding someone else.

One of the primary ways the characters, especially Will, try to fill spiritual hunger is through sex. There are many descriptive erotic scenes in Flesh and Blood, some of them perhaps too descriptive for my straight-laced tastes. Much of the erotica describes homosexual sex between men, centered around the experiences of Will as he searches for his own identity, and for a lover who will fulfill him. The only time sex between a man and a woman is described, the participants are piquing on LSD, and here, though wonderfully written, this is not erotica, but a poetic segment playing on Zoe's psychological fears and desires. Other non-conventional characters enter stage left, such as an older male friend of Zoe's who is a practicing, mature and worldly-wise transvestite. The presence of this character introduces some segments that bring in an element of strong humor which provides a little relief from the heaviness of the theme, especially when he is introduced to other, more conventional family members.

While the thematic stream of hunger runs through the novel, contrasted with the rootlessness and distance or even confusion each character feels when desire is not met, there are points when it seems to drift and expand, especially towards the second half of the book. One gets the impression at times that some of the characters read the first part, and began to feel sentimental about themselves, and that is enough: they sort of sigh and moan and without explanation become personas that are less than the expectation of the strong first half of the novel has set them up to become. The trauma of the plot, Zoe afflicted with AIDS and slowly dying, tends to eat up the theme with blank abstract sadness. It is true that unfulfilled hunger is sad; but dying of AIDS is not only sad, it is senseless and tragic, and the tragedy of it overwhelms everything else until one feels too emotionally exhausted to even think of being hungry.

The characters are thus, for all their hunger and desires, a bit hollow and forgettable. The theme drifts too often, and ironically, Flesh and Blood tends to feel haunted by characters who become their own memories, rather than filled with the literary substance of Cunningham's rich imagination. The end result is a somewhat mediocre presentation, but one that is imbued with tremendous emotion and value because of its implicit poetry



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