By Nightfall

by Michael Cunningham

Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan’s SoHo, nearing the apogee of committed careers in the arts—he a dealer, she an editor. With a spacious loft, a college-age daughter in Boston, and lively friends, they are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy. Then Rebecca’s much younger look-alike brother, Ethan (known in thefamily as Mizzy, “the mistake”), shows up for a visit. A beautiful, beguiling twenty-three-year-old with a history of drug problems, Mizzy is wayward, at loose ends, looking for direction. And in his presence, Peter finds himself questioning his artists, their work, his career—the entire world he has so carefully constructed.

Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. Full of shocks and aftershocks, it makes us think and feel deeply about the uses and meaning of beauty and the place of love in our lives.<

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Art, Novels, Queer

232 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2010

About the author

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the non-fiction book, Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. His new novel, The Snow Queen, will be published in May of 2014. He lives in New York, and teaches at Yale University.

Reviews

[Fabian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I’ve read since Mario Vargas Llosa’s “The Feast of the Goat.” Really? 2 genuine masterpieces within one month? Karma is doing me a favor; Fortuna’s Wheel, in my case, travels heavenward...

Wow. “By Nightfall.” Golly wow. I had very much forgotten about Cunningham, though I list him as my favorites, & now it is crystal clear why. I was left hella-impressed by “Specimen Days,” a book the literati have literally forgotten. That was an exercise in genre mixing, of wild and fantastical flights of fancy. This one is focused, all-encompassing. I began thinking about “Death in Venice” by Mann, and suddenly Cunningham makes an allusion to it right in the middle of it. I know that I'm in the correct wave, suddenly: that I am in the presence of something grand.

I will shock some: this is better than Mann’s opus. This book is what “A Single Man” that kinda pretentious film (I haven't read the novel), wanted to aspire to be. It is probably in the top ten gay lit books. Certainly.

Compare the American Cunningham with the British Ian McEwan. You can. Their styles are similar, but whereas McEwan exalts the British riche with its multifaceted perks of living in the highest echelons of modern society, Cunningham makes me for once proud to have a person on the same stratosphere as rich Brit live so-- fully, splendidly, enviously-- in 2010's America. The protagonist is a thinking man, but his heart somehow forms the narrative, builds its parameters firmly, and makes the quaint tale a full-blown pretty perfect masterpiece. I am not lying, it is as particular and tasteful and amazing as "Death in Venice": Beauty itself. I read it in two sittings… that in itself is magnificent (modern lives are so complex, after all)...

[Violet wells · Rating 3 out of 5]

As subject matter for a novel the midlife crisis of an affluent New York art dealer doesn't inspire much excitement. And I'm afraid I found nothing in this novel to get excited about. Perhaps it's only interesting feature was the disparity between what our narrator says in public and what he thinks in private. He lives in two different worlds. Most of what comes out of his mouth is facile insincere junk. And he's so self-engrossed it never occurs to him that everyone else might not mean half the things they say either, including his own wife and daughter. The catalyst for the crisis is the crush he develops for his wife's younger brother, the classic rebel without a cause.

I didn't warm to Michael Cunningham's most recent novel. This is his second most recent and the signs are he's been finding new inspiration hard to come by for a while now. Because I've been struggling to find anything interesting to say about this book I've just read the Guardian review by Adam Mars Jones in which, at one point, he says, "The sweet, engrossing, middlebrow braid of The Hours would have dismayed Virginia Woolf, its ostensible linchpin, as a serious venture in fiction." I was once asked to entertain Adam during a visit of his to Florence. He's the most frighteningly relentlessly intelligent person I've ever met. Especially eloquent at disparagement as his biting put down of Cunningham's most famous novel shows. But Adam didn't care much for Virginia Woolf. I spent an entire dinner trying to convince him of her genius. He wasn't having it. (I did however convince him to read Don DeLillo.) It would appear, to some extent at least, he might have changed his mind!

[Pedro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s the thing about midlife crises: they suck!!
I mean, I’ve done pretty well during my childhood crisis, my teenage years crisis, my mid-twenties crisis and even my mid-thirties crisis felt like a breeze when compared to this midlife crisis.

The problem about midlife crises, is that by the time you see yourself going through one of them you already know that you’re not going to have as much time as you thought you would during, for example, a mid-twenties crisis. I’m starting to believe that the only way to get over the frustrating feelings of being a middle-aged guy in 2021 is to stop giving a fcuk. Yes, you’ve read it correctly... I think the secret is to stop giving a damn about everything that doesn’t add up to your own personal growth. Jobs, pastimes, people and places are all among the things you need to get rid off in cases of extreme frustration. Don’t even blink; if it’s making you feel less like yourself it’s because it isn’t for you. It’s not meant to be. Full stop. Period. Move on.

Now I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t know this was a story about people going through a... ahem... midlife crisis because I knew it very well. Or maybe not as well as I thought I would based on the memories I had from 2013 when I first read it. I could still remember clearly how unlikable all the characters were but what I didn’t get the first time round but did this time was the fact there’s no such thing as unlikable characters or even unlikable real life people by the way. What we call an unlikable character/person is obviously just someone who is trying to do the best they can even if in a way that no one else understands.

This time I felt kind of sorry for Peter Harris and his messy nightmare of a life. It couldn’t possibly be a good idea to start questioning his work, his marriage, his role as a parent and even his sexuality, all at the same time. That’s looking for a big mess.

It can also happen to me. It can happen to anyone.

Regardless of the consequences, sometimes a big change is the only way out of not only a midlife crisis but any type of crisis. Change the record, change the scenery, change your shoes... even change people if need be.

So yeah... midlife crises are pretty confusing. When it seems like you know what’s going on, everything changes and all of a sudden there you are again, book still in your hands and feeling like a eight year old who has never stopped believing in magic.

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.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe too subtle for me. The story is of a middle-aged art dealer in New York City, Peter, coming to question the value of his work and the solidity of his relationship with his wife, Rebecca. This dawning of doubt is stimulated by the arrival of her much younger brother who is living an aimless life with a track record of unstable relationships with women and men. In his mid-twenties and a Yale drop-out, he has just returned from a long spell mediating at a shrine in Japan. The story they get is that he is unsure what to do with his life and wants to try some career in the arts. They are wary about whether he has returned to a past drug addiction. They still call him Mizzy, the family his family applied over his birth being a mistake.

With a set-up like this, one would expect a lot of melodramatics. But Cunningham has an unusual way of playing with those expectations. While we wait for something significant to happen and our moral judgements to be exercised, we spend a lot of time with Peter as he goes about his business. I enjoyed the window on his world and warmed to his sensibilities and day-to-day interactions with the artists and his staff. Like his trying to engage one brilliant sculptor as a client by a trial placement of one of his works in the garden of a rich, eccentric female customer in Connecticut. Other less gifted artists whose works don’t sell call for kind ways to retire them as clients, while for another moderately talented one he does his best to put on a good show of her work at his gallery. The flow of his mind in daily life comes close to Cunningham’s marvelous channeling of Woolfe’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in his “The Hours”. Warm and lively as a read, not a the challenging emulation of elemental mind we tag stream-of-consciousness.

As time goes on the big question is what is really wrong with his life. We look for cracks in the foundation of his marriage to his wife, who edits an arts magazine. Any big issue over sexuality? Among three grown children, Jake is most concerned about silence that has fallen between him and his youngest, a college-aged daughter working as a waitress in Boston. Does any sense of failure as a parent contribute to Peter's undermining? The loss of his beloved brother to AIDS in the 80’s gnaws at his consciousness as well. And where have all his friends gone?

I can’t tell if this restrained, bloodless tale is some form of indictment of the hollowness of modern life at the core of civilization, which we all tend to take New York City to be. I don’t think so. There is no slicing of our soul here with the pathos of the road not taken. There is no redeeming humor or chaotic scramble for modes of youth like we get from so many masters of the mid-life crises (think Bellow, Updike, Russo). Instead there is a dwelling on art. And maybe with the problems in the temptation to see people as living art.

I do believe esthetics is at the core of finding balance with our being on earth and more of a key to pleasure in life than any happiness you can seek as a goal from having things or through achievements. Cunningham stirs these thoughts up in me, but I don’t quite get his message. Of course, literature, like art, bores us when it can be boiled down to a message. There are some references that raise the question of whether the characters here reflect either Mann’s “Magic Mountain” or his “Death in Venice”. I guess I could use some help with that given that the former is that Rushmore I yearned for but failed to climb and the latter I experienced only as a movie (a dying man uplifted through pining over a beautiful boy in another esthetic capital of the world). I am a fan of the idea that art is supposed to shake you and spit you out, transformed and somehow made better from an alternate view of reality. This book was a bit too tame to really rock my world or transport me out of my humdrum.

[John Arfwedson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Here's the question Michael Cunningham needed to ask of his protagonist, Peter Harris, before starting this novel: if you had to do it all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?

Peter, a study in self-absorption to the point of solipsism, is obsessed with himself and his malaise but in an intensely undramatic, uninteresting way. Part of this is conceptual. If you're going to write about the howling cliche of a middle-aged man going through a mid-life crisis, he had better be deeply entertaining, wildly fascinating, or at least humorously self-aware - Harris isn't and Cunningham can't seem to conceive of him as anyone other than a real Sad Sack burrowing boringly to the center of his underfurnished soul for 238 pages.

Counterexamples make the point best. Read Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" to see how it's done: self-obsession, self-seriousness, self-mockery, and of course, as my old nuns would say, self-abuse, all turned inside out in a rocketing id-on-the-loose carnival of laughter, lethality, and the annihilation of convention. Note to self: it works because it's funny.

A more recent example is Russo's "Straight Man". Like Portnoy and Harris, Russo's man, Devereaux, is the walking cliche of the middle-aged man in crisis but he has the wit not to take himself or his situation at all seriously, thereby lending them both a subtle gravity. The result is a comic masterpiece which moves with narrative speed, episodic fleet-footedness, and offhand elegance. Unexpected bonus: beneath the laughter there runs a wry river of actual wisdom about life, relationships, regret, and loss. Of human beings, their discontents and what strategies we should use against the dark, Russo has cut more than Cunningham has printed.

What Cunningham fatally misses is that Peter's sad view of his sad, unhappy I-feel-so-sorry-for-myself life is essentially (of course I mean absolutely) comic. That's the only way to view it artistically and have a hope of bringing it off plausibly for the reader. I mean, who really wants to read the aching lament of an overprivileged beauty broker nattering on about his lost youth, dead brother, aging wife, pretty brother-in-law, and how beauty fades? Doesn't that sound like the setup to a joke?

We are in Peter's head throughout and it's a mighty boring place. While we're waiting for characters to respond in dialogue Peter's given to endless stone-faced commentaries on behavior, or society, or art, or something. Some of this is anthropologically interesting, especially some of the art stuff, but even there it's interesting in an essaylike way, not a novelistic way. Mostly these observations sound like homework Cunningham's doing for a Phd thesis. He's trying very hard to sound smart and observant but it comes across in laborious, portentous, sententious ways (just the kinds of words he overuses), and worse, the story stops dead in its tracks every time. Connected to this is Cunningham's maddeningly obtuse inside-the-sentences technique of qualifying (almost) (every) statement with switchbacks and counters and doubts and second thoughts - the staccato stopping and starting may strike Cunningham as the mental portrait of a smart guy being smart but it reads like the transcript of a dull guy being repetitive (repeatedly).

Part of Cunningham sweating too much to convince of how VERY SERIOUSLY we should take Peter's dilemma is the assiduous way he lards the text with many literary/artistic references as if trying to take on mythopoeic freight by association (Mann's "The Magic Mountain", Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby", and any number of artists, old, modern, and obscure). The effect is weightless grandiosity. In fact, straining for SIGNIFICANCE this way makes the shallowness of Peter's pedestrian display of consciousness all the more obvious.

Instead of reading this heavy-handed novel, try the recently published "An Object of Beauty" by Steve Martin. I haven't read it yet but it is also about the New York art world and has the great advantage of being written by a man who started out as a comedian.

Or read any play by Moliere. He'd have known what to do with Peter Harris: "The Imaginary Crisis and How I Overcame It".

Final advice: Laugh. Repeat. It's our only defense against seriously sad novels like this and the onslaught of what awaits.

[Richard Kramer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegant, sexy, achingly familiar to the point that I had to put it down and say: He knows me. Is that really me?
What's it about? It's about how when you're young you long for and fear life at the same moment; when you're not young you regard the young, as happens here, and long for life and fear that your life has been spent. And then, finally, you learn to look away. The book is over before you know it, but it rides with you, next to you, on the subway, in the bus, in the elevator to your apartment. Aschenbach, gazing at the golden Tadzio, had to die on the sand with his makeup melting; Peter, here, has to gaze at his wife's screwed up, exquisite twenty-three year-old brother, Mizzy, and go on. I read this a few months ago, but thinking about it now, I think of THE HOURS, too, about how that was "about" (among other things) those who survive, who remain; Leonard Woolf, Clarissa, Julianne Moore the name of whose character I forget. In BY NIGHTFALL, Peter remains after the loss of the idea of a former self. As we all must. Or as I, anyway, am trying to.

[christa · Rating 5 out of 5]

There must be a time when you have craved a combination of words that simply did not exist. You look for them -- in songs, in books, in blurbs here and there, and movie dialogue. It becomes exhausting. Frustrating, maybe even lonely. Flipping through more words, more quickly, and no one is saying the goddamn two sentence goose bump inducer that needs to be invented for this exact place in space You'd write it if you could, but if you could write it you probably wouldn't need it. If you could write it, you'd know what it looks like.

This is at the crux of Michael Cunningham's so-beautiful-you-can-feel-your-own-soul-as-it- exfoliates novel "By Nightfall."

Peter is in those awkward middle-aged man years, at the fork that bends left toward status quo and right to off the rails, world scorching destruction in a new and exciting way. He owns an art gallery in SoHo. He's got a nice wife named Rebecca, equally arty, and a standing Sunday date. And they still think it's interesting to touch each others private parts, as evidenced in an early scene in the book that has them up well past their bedtime.

Rebecca's much younger brother Mizzy (as in "The Mistake") comes to stay with them in their funky, no privacy loft. He's fresh off a stint staring at rocks halfway around the world, and some druggie escapades before that. He's thinking of a career in the arts, which makes this particular mentorship with these particular adults make sense. The 24-year-old has the face of a young Rebecca, and a history of oozing potential, all prodigy-like. Peter's reunion with his brother-in-law is a sudsy mess of awkward: The elder thinks his wife is in the shower, and slips in for some grab ass, only to realize he's trespassed into dude territory. And, uh oh, damn that boy is fine. See also: Rodin.

Peter has a seven layer dish of disarray: Career-wise, he's frustrated by the artists that show work in his gallery. He's looking for some authenticity and beauty, and everything is a cog off for him, including a young wonderkin who designs urns, or rather a caricature of urns, that are breathtaking from a distance and up close, marred with slang for genitalia, and offensive lyrics in a wonderfully fresh and up-and-comery way. His relationship with his daughter is on the fritz. The college student-turned-hotel bartender is still gathering steam over a series of perceived adolescent slightings, which Peter remembers differently than the angry voice on the other end of the infrequent phone calls. He's still struggling with the loss of his HIV positive older brother, who died years ago, and some unresolved feelings about their relationship. His own aging process is eating away at him. It's in the graying of his hair, and the softening of his wife. And there is the ongoing struggle between potential and actuality. Anticipation versus fruition.

We are right there inside Peter's head as he takes all of this discontent and channels it into a heady lust fest starring Mizzy, a young charmer and seducer. The kind of guy who walks around naked, flashes winning smiles, always presents the right response, and seems comfortable in any environment. All of a sudden Peter, aged 40 something, wonders if he is "gay for one man."

When Peter discovers that Mizzy is still using, they become tangled in the secret they are keeping from Rebecca, the sort of thing that only fuels the tug of Peter's bone dog.

This novel is just beautiful. There are passages where the hair on my arms stood. Peter's head is both a comfortable and uncomfortable place to spend 200 plus pages of introspection. The scenes and the navel gazing both have that artistic sensibility of a person who knows how the subtle addition of an urn can change the flow of a space. Peter unfolds, first gradually, then manically, and the transition is totally organic. All the while, this character has a foot in reality, can actually see himself and knows the potential for world-changing destruction and yet can't stop himself. An entire row of Oreos at the ready, followed by no Oreos left, black chalky dust caked into lips.

And, um, I'd be lying through omission if I didn't mention that there are some super hot scenes. Not just the aforementioned husband-wife rodeo, but also places where the suggestion of what might be is hot-hot-hot.

[Ally Armistead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just finished reading Michael Cunningham's "By Nightfall," and I'm, well, underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong: Cunningham is a freaking amazing writer--a sentence-crafter that will make you sit up straight and say "holy crap; how does he think of these things?" But overall, as far as the story of Peter Harris is concerned, I am left with the taste of "meh" in my mouth. And damnit, I'm trying to figure out why. Part of it may have to do with the difficulty (MY difficulty) of finding empathy for the existential crisis of a well-to-do New York art dealer who has everything in life, but has his head up his ass and a hard-on for his brother-in-law. It's hard to find a desire to care when the world, everyday, seems to be falling apart at the seams. But still, that aside, the novel is less of a story, and more of a meditation on middle-age: the fear of growing old, the fear of never finding, being, or having beauty, and ultimately the fear of death. These are beautiful themes, but when you're looking at them through the lens of the upper working class of New York City, it's a little, well, stagnant. Honestly, I thought the film "Moonstruck" did a far better job of getting at the heart of these same themes, while being a much better story. But that's apples and oranges, and film is film, and literature and literature, but "By Nightfall" is by no means in the same camp as "The Hours." Still, a worthwhile read for some truly beautiful passages by a real master. Three out of five stars for me.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book 10 of 2019.

A cynical person (not me, obviously; I’m never cynical) might suggest an alternate title for this book could be ‘First World Problems’. They might also suggest the book is just a tad on the pretentious side.

As I say, though, I don’t have a cynical bone in my body (cough) so I’ll just say that I really found myself completely sucked into this little story. I was 100% engaged the entire time and found the author’s style really rather beautiful in places.

This is a story about art, for starters, and how little we sometimes know ourselves. This is something I think most people can probably relate to, even if we’re not wealthy art gallery owners like this book’s protagonist. Said protagonist is having a little bit of a mid-life crisis and finds himself questioning his career, his relationships, his sexuality and the overall meaning of his existence. He does a lot of worrying about these things (in fact, not a huge amount actually happens in this book; it’s largely an exercise in navel-gazing, but I don’t mean that in a bad way) but, of course, in the end, when the bombshell hits it comes from an entirely unexpected direction.

This was my first Cunningham but I’ll definitely be returning to his work at some point.

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read another book from Cunningham quite recently called The Hours, and it quite literally blew my mind. This book, on the other hand, didn't. I mean, I wasn't exactly expecting a bed of roses here, but I was hoping for more plot wise, but unfortunately, this failed to deliver.

What one first notices about a Cunningham book, is the effortlessly beautiful use of language. It hypnotizes the reader from beginning to end, and causes one to reread a passage just so you can feel the power of it all over again.

The reason I didn't absolutely, wholeheartedly love this, is because I just didn't like the story, or, any of the characters. Peter is a middle-aged man, and is married to Rebecca, and Peter begins to question his marriage and sexuality when Rebecca's younger brother Mizzy comes to stay.

The truth is, Peter is just too incredibly dull and self absorbed for me to care much about, and the same probably goes for his wife, too. They just didn't have anything interesting for me to latch on to, and this was present until the very end.

So here, I've experienced wonderful writing, but a mediocre story, and I'm hoping my next Cunningham will be better.

[Tricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of this book takes place in Peter Harris's head, and not much "action" happens. So, I could see how a lot of people would get turned off by this book, and I'll admit that for most of it, I wasn't quite sure where it was heading or what the point of it was. On the surface, it might seem difficult to sympathize with this man who's problems include, but aren't limited to, that he finds his wife not as beautiful as she used to be, his college-age daughter isn't as brilliant or interesting as he wants her to be, and that at times, he (a successful art dealer) feels like a servant to his rich, art-buying clientele. But I found his perpetual dissatisfaction and inability to see and appreciate his life as it is as part of the human condition. His constant search for perfection and beauty in his professional career as an art dealer leaked into his personal life as well, explaining a lot of shocking choices he makes. I didn't love this book until the very last two pages, and perhaps loved it even more because of the final sentence. I won't spoil it, but those last moments in the book illustrated the idea that people will never fail to surprise you, even someone you've lived with for 25 years+ and that's a great thing.

[Catherine B. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found this to be a very s-l-o-w read. The narrator of the book is unlikeable to me and too whiny for my taste. I could not bring myself to feel for the characters of the book. The ending was so anti-climatic, just go about your business.

This is not Cunninghma's best work.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I started reading this book about Peter Harris, a forty something New York art dealer going through a bit of a midlife crisis, I thought this is no where near as good as The Hours and I was a bit disappointed. But then the last chapter...BAM! Just brilliant. Still didn’t get inside me like The Hours did, but I’m not sure many books will be as good as that one for me.
The writing is great, Cunningham gets inside his main characters mind and creates a believable person. The many themes seemed to me to be about what makes a good life and the contrast between being great or ordinary, and what is happiness and maybe just maybe, stop thinking you’re the only one thinking about this stuff.

[Greg Zimmerman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Midway through Michael Cunnigham's slim new novel, By Nightfall, a character describes a rich woman's expensively decorated living room as "...so magnificent it transcends its own pretensions." That's also a good description for what Cunningham must've hoped his novel would be. But since it's not exactly magnificent, we're pretty much left with just pretentious. And the novel, though well-crafted, sure is that.

But the novel failed for another reason, too: Its protagonist is an utter dolt. Far be it from me to need likable characters to enjoy a novel, but Peter Harris is not just unlikeable — he's totally unbelievable. Here's the story: Peter's a mid-40s New York City art dealer in the midst of a crisis. He's not sure he's happy with his life. (Real original, right?) When his wife Rebecca's much-younger, much-troubled brother Mizzy comes for a visit, idealistic Peter develops all these notions of Mizzy as quintessential Youth, Beauty, and the Happiness of his marriage when it was still new. And then, Peter thinks he might be in love with Mizzy. But is he actually in love with Mizzy or is he in love with what he's convinced himself that Mizzy represents?

But heterosexual, married Peter's possible homosexual crush on his brother-in-law (which to Cunningham's credit is certainly an original take on the mid-life crisis dilemma!) is not even the ridiculous part. The ridiculous part is how silly Peter, who Cunningham painstakingly renders as this uber-self-aware, contemplative, hip New Yorker, seems at various points in the novel. He's like a rocket scientist who can't balance his checkbook. As one example of this: Early in the novel, he comes home and sees Mizzy naked in the shower and actually mistakes him for his wife, wondering why she looks so much younger all of a sudden. Yes, this is a foreshadowing of what's to come, but its too gimmicky to be believable. And then later, Peter so blatantly misses some rather important signs that by that point are so obvious to the reader, it's impossible to take him seriously anymore.

So, then, Peter's naïvete contradicts with his (and the novel's) pretentiousness. As evidence of that pretentiousness, read this sentence (from Peter's thoughts): "She sighs voluptuously. She could so easily be a Klimt portrait, with her wide-set eyes and bony little apostrophe of a nose." A beautiful sentence, no doubt. But how does someone sigh voluptuously? And who is Klimt? Peter certainly knows, and maybe that's how an art dealer would think, but Cunningham is practically holding it over his readers' heads that they don't. And that, and dozens of similar examples throughout the novel, are what drags the novel into pretentiousness.

I do think By Nightfall is an original, smart piece of contemporary lit. But to me, the annoying peripherals cancel out the ingenuity of the story and Cunningham's often stylish prose. I'd like to give Cunningham's work another shot, though, because while I didn't much like this one, I know a lot of people really like Cunningham's other work, especially The Hours. Is Specimen Days good? Any other suggestions on where to look for another shot at Cunningham?

[Lea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really didn't like the main protagonist of this book. Peter is a middle-aged art dealer in New York City, feeling sorry for himself, obsessed with beauty and youth, and wishing his wife, Rebecca, was the younger version of herself. Then Rebecca's much younger brother Mizzy (The Mistake), a genius/drug addict/ Yale drop out drifter type in his early 20's comes to visit them for some time. Peter falls in, what he calls, love with him, what I would call lust and a slight obsession. In Mizzy he sees the early beauty potential of his wife, his own possibilities and his dead brother combined.

It's hard to shake the feeling that Peter's pretentiousness also somewhat applies to the novel itself. The obsession with youth and perfect beauty, the carefully constructed sentences, the descriptions of New York (always New York!) and dreams and self analysis... And despite this, I loved reading this novel! It's my second Cunningham, and now I'm determined to read them all. I grabbed this on a whim in an Oxfam charity shop and breezed through it.

[Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book, though I don't know that anyone else will. Very little happens, the narrator could be accused of being whiny, and the narration itself is at times over wrought. The tone is highly literary, and Cunningham frequently alludes to Joyce's Ulysses, Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Mann's Death in Venice, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and the real-life doomed affair of Rimbaud and Veralaine.

It reminded me of an Ian McEwan (swoon) novel in its slow inexorable pace, its plot deliciously filled out by digressions and musings about beauty and art and marriage and aging and death. The book is a meditation on and search for the nature of beauty. It's also a coming of age novel, but for middle-agers-- people who haven't been innocent for quite awhile, but who still harbor some notion of the existence of the ideal.

At one point the narrator wonders: "Isn't this part of what you keep looking for in art-- rescue from solitude and subjectivity, the sense of company in history and the greater world, the human mystery simultaneously illuminated and deepened?" Despite its flaws, this book did all those things for me.

[Maria Roxana · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Poate că, la urma urmei, nu virtuțile altora ne frâng inima, cât senzația de recunoaștere aproape insuportabil de ascuțită atunci când îi vedem în ce au mai josnic, în tristețea și-n lăcomia lor. Ai nevoie și de virtuți-de un soi de virtuți-dar nu ne pasă de Emma Bovary sau de Anna Karenina sau de Raskolnikov pentru că-s buni. Ne pasă pentru că nu-s admirabili, pentru că sunt ca noi și pentru că marii scriitori i-au iertat din cauza asta.”

”Din nou, cuțitul în inimă. Cineva care se îngrijorează în privința ta, are grijă de tine și pentru care tu faci la fel..nu trăiesc cuplurile mai mult decâ oamenii singuri pentru că se bucură de mai multă grijă? N-a făcut cineva un studiu pe tema asta?”

”La câțiva pași distanță e cea mai rară dintre făpturi-o altă ființă care crede că e singură. Adică da, ok, probabil, nu suntem, în singurătate, profund sau nici măcar sesizabil diferiți, dar cum poți ști asta, de-adevăratelea, despre cineva, în afara ta însuți? Nu face asta parte din ceea ce cauți în artă-o salvare de singurătate și de subiectivitate; sensul unei tovărășii în istorie și în lumea largă..”

”Asta e, deci? Capacitatea de a-ți păsa de altcineva, de a-ți imagina cum să fii altcineva, e parte din cădere. E esențială pentru câte-un sfânt ici, colo (dacă există asemenea făpturi), însă e doar un aspect al vieții, o viață mare și ambiguă care-ți frânge inima.
Și totuși. Nu e nimic.”

[Bill Krieger · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a story about malaise. And whining. It's the malaise that accompanies privilege and success and middle age too, I guess. It's a very whiny story about a whiny guy. The main character is a successful art dealer in Manhattan. He's middle age and yet still brimming with teen angst. Most of the characters in the book are completely self-absorbed. Blech.

I thought Cunningham's writing style was OK. The book was a light and fast read, and the ending was not bad. But it's a tough slog when you have virtually no likeable characters and the focus of the story is a constant blizzard of complaining. Silly example: the art dealer has an stomach ache, so he worries that maybe he has stomach cancer. Jeez.

While I was reading "By Nightfall", I thought of Woody Allen. He covers all this stuff: city angst, middle age whining, the malaise of success, etc. But Woody does it with humor and sarcasm. It felt like Cunningham meant for us to take all this stuff very seriously and to extract some life lesson from all this: rich, successful and attractive people complaining about everything and anything. Cmon!
yow, bill

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know how to describe this novel without using the word 'mannered' but I don't mean to suggest the artistry of Henry James I am talking the navel gazing self obsession of the vacuously dull and uninteresting and calls to mind repression. I read this novel and never read another Cunningham novel - is anyone keeping track of his not-very-interesting-but-obsessive use of a younger brother older sister and brother-in-law triangle of obsessed-with-each-other but not-doing-anything-about-it scenarios? As I read on-and-on through the polite language that says nothing in this novel I longed for the James Robert Baker version of this polite tale of emotionally constipated and boring New York art gallery crowd. Let's be clear this is not about artists in the form Basquet or Banksy but of the Julian Schnabel/Damien Hirst artists as brand label mode.

Rich white middle class men having a midlife crisis have the their lives examined with pointillist (or do I mean pointless) obsession by an etiolated writer of style but no substance like Cunningham but I don't have to read it more than once I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

[Cristians. Sirb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Povestea asta nu lasă loc de un “mâine”.
O ironie devastatoare mătură totul. Până și bunele intenții. Mijlocul vieții e finalul. Oamenii caută să se așeze, în loc să încerce diferența. Obsesia de a acumula. De a avansa în carieră. De a te instala confortabil, de viu, în sicriul unei familii ce scârțâie sinistru. În loc să explorezi până la epuizare. Până ți se termină combustibilul.

[TL *Humaning the Best She Can* · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

Quote from the beginning of the book:
Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. - Rainer Maria Rilke
---

Some beautiful writing:

"It's hard to say what he feels. He wishes it were as simple as sorrow for Bette. It's hollower than sorrow. It's a deep loneliness muddled up with some underlayer of jittery fear, who knows what to call it, but he wants to see his wife, he wants to curl up with her, maybe watch something stupid on TV, let the world go dark for the night, let it fall. "


The silence takes on a certain decisiveness, like the interlude during which it becomes apparent that a date is not going well; that nothing promising is going to happen after all. Soon, if this awkwardness doesn't resolve itself, it will be established that Peter and Mizzy--this Mizzy, anyway, this troubled, world - scavenging boy who has supposedly been clean for over a year -- don't get along"


Like a medieval bas-relief, he possesses a certain aspect of what Peter can only think of as youth personified, the sense of a young hero who in life was probably not so beautiful and quite possibly not all that heroic and was certainly mauled into bloody bits in the battle in which he died but afterword--after life--some anonymous artisan has granted him impeccable features and put him to perfect sleep, under the painted eyes of saints and martyrs, as generation after generation of the temporarily living light candles for their dead.


Because, all right, he wants it to be true, and it might, it might conceivably be true, that Mizzy has been mooning over him since Peter read Babar to him when he was four. Peter doesn't think of himself, never has, as someone to be mooned over. Yes, he's seductive and he's decent-looking but he's the guy, looking up at the balcony from the garden below. He's the servant of beauty, he's not beauty itself"
----

The story itself? Overall meh... despite some good moments, I never felt much any of the people in it. It's hard to feel sympathy for Peter... he's self-absorbed but that wouldn't have bothered me so much if I could have connected to him or the story itself.

There were a couple times I did love Mizzy but it fizzled out quickly. I could tell what his angle was the moment a certain something happened in the story. Almost felt sorry for Peter then... almost.

After awhile even the writing failed to spark anything for me, no fault with it but I just got very disconnected from it.

Just felt distant from... everything really.

I wouldn't recommend this as your first by this author, this is a type of book you'll either love or find boring... maybe you'll like it better, who knows? Still will read more by this author but this one for me, is not one of his best.

Happy reading!

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Cunningham can write the sh*t out of some books. If I could, I would have put this at 4.5 stars, but I can't so I'm rounding up. I blazed through this very quickly. Which is actually a shame with Cuninngham's work because he is such a smart writer and I know I'm missing a lot of what he's up to from a literary standpoint. But his knack for characters and dialogue catches me every time and I just have to know what happens to these people.

I've skimmed a couple of other reviewers who didn't like the main character. If Cunningham wanted the reader to like him, we would, so this has to be deliberate. I really appreciate an author who is willing to let his characters be ambiguous and human. I will say I felt that Rebecca got a bit lost. She seemed to be so fully formed, yet faded from the narrative. Of course, Peter was falling in love with the younger version of her in her brother while remembering his own lost gay brother.

Though the novel is fairly short, and takes place over a few days, there's a lot going on here. Cunningham has given us fully formed characters, completely in their lives. There is nothing easy about these people and that is Cunningham's genius.

[Konserve Ruhlar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okuduğu roman ve hikayelerde yazarın dilinin kurgu ve olaylardan daha önemli olduğunu düşünen okurlar için muhteşem bir kitap olduğunu söyleyebilirim. Gözlemlerin uzun uzun anlatıldığı dolu dolu paragraflar, karakterin kurduğu cümlelerin yanında bitiveren içi zekice yazılmış parantezler, karakterin bilinç akışından metne yağan duygu yağmurları edebi bir şölen gibi çıkıyor karşımıza. Zeka ve ironi her satırda hissediliyor. Edebiyat, sinema ve sanata yapılan ince göndermeler romanı daha da üst bir seviyeye taşıdı benim için. Kitapta bahsedilen yazar ve kitaplar öyle doğru yerlerde karşımıza çıkıyor ki yazara hayran oluyorsunuz. Cunningham benim için tıpkı Philip Roth gibi en sevdiğim Amerikan yazarlar arasında.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

What are we to make of Michael Cunningham's horny new novel about the power of beauty to rouse us from ennui? The question gets no help from the publisher, which illustrates its dark title with a funereal tulip instead of, say, the abs on Michelangelo's "David." The dust jacket describes "By Nightfall" as "heartbreaking . . . full of shocks and aftershocks." But actually, it's rather witty and a little outrageous -- none of that difficult reanimation of Virginia Wolfe in "The Hours," which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, or the Whitmanian sprawl of his last novel, "Specimen Days." No, from the complex triptychs of his previous two books, Cunningham has moved to a svelte story with just a touch of actual plot about an art dealer feeling cramped by his own smallness. With its eroticized reflections on modern aesthetics and liberal guilt, it's like watching a bi-curious college professor annotate an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.

At 44, Peter Harris is contentedly married (20 years) and living in a SoHo loft that makes him feel proud if cliche. As the owner of an exclusive gallery, he glides through the wealthiest houses and apartments, ingratiating and confident in equal measure as he manages the anxieties and vanities of his artists and clients. He's "never graduated to the majors," but a few careful moves could elevate him into that rarefied realm.

One of the pleasures of this novel is Cunningham's description of these intoxicating homes, from the "insistent glittery buzz" of a Manhattan party to a rambling mansion on the coast, "all fieldstone and gables, girded on three of its four sides by verandas; contrived, somehow, with a sense of absolute authenticity." Among the many classic literary voices he channels is F. Scott Fitzgerald, simultaneously swooning over and deriding these gorgeous temples of consumerism.

And he's even better with the trophies that decorate such homes: the objects that pass through galleries like Peter's, trying to catch the eye of the right editor, the right curator or a handful of influential critics who can transform, say, a giant ball of tar and hair into a multimillion-dollar masterpiece. Cunningham moves fluently through this occult world of fortune and taste, demonstrating his appreciation for modern art and his disdain for the lacquer of hucksterism. He can riff brilliantly on the bizarre work of Damien Hirst (remember that shark in formaldehyde) just as confidently as he can make up his own artists and slot their pieces into the cult of beauty, shock and excess money.

We meet Peter when he's quietly mulling over the dissatisfactions of his life, among them the nagging worry that he's failed his college-aged daughter and the sense that he's not quite ambitious enough or vulgar enough to rise higher. After a "lifelong, congenital disappointment," a deeper thirst is troubling him, too, a desperate desire for a kind of beauty that seems out of reach: "He can't stop himself from mourning some lost world, he couldn't say which world exactly but someplace that isn't this."

Yes, this is another midlife crisis novel (a crowded market if there ever was one), but it's redeemed by the hero's willingness to mock his preciousness, to recognize the audacity of even a sliver of discontent amid such bounty. During a night of queasy insomnia Peter thinks, "How could he, could any member of the .00001 percent of the prospering population, dare to be troubled . . . ? He is impossibly fortunate; frighteningly fortunate. Your troubles, little man? Think of them as an appetizer that didn't turn out quite right. You should sing and frolic, you should make obeisance to any god you can think of."

While Jonathan Franzen -- God bless him -- is still pumping away at the big-plotted novel, several other super-sophisticated writers have published books this year about middle-aged men studying their navels: I'm thinking of James Hynes's "Next," Jonathan Lethem's "Chronic City" and Joshua Ferris's "The Unnamed" -- a mixed bag, to be sure, but all plot-starved books that put tremendous pressure on the author's style. In that regard, Cunningham reigns supreme. There are flashier, more pyrotechnic stylists, but for pure, elegant, efficient beauty, Cunningham is astounding. He's developed this captivating narrative voice that mingles his own sharp commentary with Peter's mock-heroic despair. Half Henry James, half James Joyce, but all Cunningham, it's an irresistible performance, cerebral and campy, marked by stabbing moments of self-doubt immediately undercut by theatrical asides and humorous quips.

Peter, you see, is a man burdened with hyper-self-analysis that delivers every personal insight gilded with irony. He reflexively thinks of himself and those around him in terms of literary characters and mythologized historical figures. They crowd his imagination (and these pages), from Isabel Archer to Dorothea Brooke, Helen and the Trojans, Ludwig of Bavaria, Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, Dante and Beatrice.

But what gives the novel its considerable frisson is the intrusion of Peter's impossibly seductive, much younger brother-in-law. Nicknamed Mizzy ("The Mistake"), Ethan is a bisexual drug addict who's sucked up his family's money and affection for years. He wants to crash with his sister and Peter while he figures out what he'd like to do next -- maybe "Something in the Arts." Till then, he'll just tiptoe around the apartment in full-frontal Grecian splendor and masturbate in his room. Peter reacts with politely repressed disdain, but the young man's beauty quickly overwhelms him and soon he's fantasizing about touching Mizzy's "pallid, fine-boned prettiness," his "slumbering perfection. . . . It had seemed to him that angels might look like this."

How gay is it?

That's Peter's question, but ours, too, as the novel becomes increasingly flamboyant, giving itself over to a lush internal melodrama, "the painful gorgeousness of caring that much." Of course, Peter is self-aware enough to acknowledge the homosexual component of his attraction, but he also sees his brother-in-law, this "beautiful princeling," as a long-lost work of art, the perfect object that demolishes everything and remakes his world.

This is not an easy argument to make with a straight -- or gay -- face. There's a touch of "I buy Playgirl for the articles" here, and Cunningham pushes hard on celebrating a kind of beauty that transcends mere sexual desire. Even without a death in Venice, it gets a bit overwrought, though only in ways that Cunningham anticipates and acknowledges -- all "very nineteenth century," as a discreet colleague observes. While the drama between Peter and his feckless brother-in-law is arresting, it can't really rise to tragedy or romance or even scandal because Peter is too self-conscious of the situation's competing meanings: psychological, aesthetic and farcical. "He's a poor, funny little man, isn't he?" he says of himself toward the end, but most of us poor, funny little people don't have Peter's capacity to simultaneously critique and star in our own psychosexual crises.

If the novel's final revelation seems a bit bland, it's more than compensated for by the insight and humor that come before. Admittedly, "By Nightfall" doesn't have the emotional breadth of "The Hours," but it's a cerebral, quirky reflection on the allure of phantom ideals and even, ultimately, on what a traditional marriage needs to survive.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually wrote this review out on paper first. I wanted to make sure I got this review right.

Before I read By Nightfall, I had never read a Cuningham novel. Little did I realize, I was in for a surprise.

When I read the premise for By Nightfall, I have to admit, I wasn't jumping up and down with excitement. It sounded intriguing enough, and I knew Michael Cunningham was, or is, pretty well-known, so, I decided to give it a shot. I am glad I did.

We meet a couple in their forties, Peter and Rebecca Harris, who both live in the art world. Peter is an art dealer, and Rebecca is an editor of an arts and culture magazine.

Rebecca's much younger brother Ethan, a 23 year old recovering drug addict, comes to stay with Peter and Rebecca temporarily. Known as "Mizzy", shortened for 'the mistake,' Mizzy/Ethan's stay will be more than just a stay....it will turn all three lives upside down in, what was for me, a very unexpected way. His arrival is uncomfortable, and both Peter and Rebecca are apprehensive about the idea.

This is a beautifully written story. I found myself really enjoying "the art world." As the story progresses, we find Peter thinks a lot about life, relationships, death, of course art, but also Mizzy.....

Mizzy doesn't really have any direction in life. In fact, it sounds as if he is just sailing by. A memorable quote of Mizzy's is him saying he doesn't want to do nothing, but he isn't good at anything, like other people. He does show an interest in art.

Mizzy is also attractive.....whether he is in the kitchen, outside, or elsewhere. He is described to be attractive like Rebecca, but a younger version. And sharing her slim, attractive body....

As I read this book, I felt...uneasy, for some reason. I didn't really know what was going to happen and when. But I could feel it coming. Unsettling is also a word I use to describe this story as being. And, I'm not saying these are bad things to feel when reading a novel. It's nice when an author can create such feelings in a reader.

I liked Peter, but also felt bad for him for different reasons. A man who seems bored with life, family, and his career.

I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say, it surprised me. I think so because, well....I guess I didn't really think things would go so far. Sometimes nothing ever comes of desire....

Cunningham wrote a beautiful story. I felt as if I was there watching everything unfold. I felt like I was in Peter's head and in his world. Don't expect an action-packed story, because that isn't the point. It's an understated quality, in which the story builds up subtly, and it works well for this novel.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Update, 4/2/13: reading Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, in which she urges that not only does beauty not distract us from justice, but leads us to embrace it -- she writes, "anyone who sets out in the morning to defend beauty will surely by nightfall have arrived at the strategy of claiming that beauty assists justice," and I think that Cunningham's book acts out a number of premises embedded in her theory of aesthetics -- the search for beauty here distracts Peter from the good, but its presence is also shown as an instrument of the good.)

Some books carry with them the memory of the circumstances under which we read them; Bonfire of the Vanities will always make me think of a hot backyard in Accra, and John Updike recalled reading The Portrait of the Lady during his subway commute as a young father.

This book was so absolutely perfect that not only will I associate it with a long subway ride to Sugar Hill and back to Brooklyn on election day 2012 to vote -- thinking of the subway ITSELF makes me think of this book, and I ride the thing every day.

I may have found the protagonist more sympathetic than I should have -- he may be a little more of antihero than I allowed -- but I don't think his confusion of beauty and truth is treated archly. Indeed, his musings made me laugh out loud a few times in sympathy with his position, though it would be a mistake to call this a funny book. The imaginary artists represented by the protagonist's gallery are quite convincing, too...watch for the passage in Mackinac: Cunningham's epigraph, from Rilke, reads "beauty is just the beginning of terror," but the Mackinac passage left this reader convinced that beauty has its own redemptive power. Perfect prose.

PS, a quote: "What's astonishing to Peter is the way the work itself seems to change, more or less in the way of a reasonably pretty girl who is suddenly treated as a beauty....Renee Zellweger-moonfaced, squinty-eyed, a character actress if ever there was one-was just on the cover of Vogue, looking ravishing in a silver gown. It is, of course, a trick of perception-the understanding that that funny little artist or that quirky-looking girl must be taken with new seriousness-but Peter suspects there's a deeper change at work. Being the focus of that much attention (and, yes, of that much money) seems to differently excite the molecules of the art or the actress or the politician. It's not just a phenomenon of altered expectations, it's a genuine transubstantiation, brought about by altered expectations. Renee Zellweger becomes a beauty and would look like a beauty to someone who had never heard of her."

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book I've read by Michael Cunningham!!! WOW!!! I'm a HUGE fan already!!!

Yet--I'm *CLEAR* this is 'not' an author for 'many' people. I'm sure some people might 'hate' this book ---or at best think its great writing ---but the story is really about 'NOTHING'.

This book speaks to my dark side --It feeds into my cerebral triple-Gemini complicated inner voice.
It 'feeds' on my mind like an addiction ---(a BAD DRUG)...

I'm not sure how healthy this book is for people like me ---(its too close to how my mind really operates as in 'thinks'):
In layers --more layers --and more layers

Sometimes 'no words' at all could ever match the emotions-feelings-desires-thoughts-passions that are living 'within'. Michael Cunningham comes 'close' to expressing WITH WORDS that place from 'within'.

Healthy or not...
---I'm left wanting 'more' to read from this author!!

....Its 'very' rare I read a book with THIS much HUMAN BEING MASTERY! (understanding relationships---complicated & vulnerable). The dialog in this book is soooooooooooooooo GOOD --stretching boundaries in the areas of love and sexuality.

Allowing for a look into the need for 'safety'....

A marvelous book!

To whom I this book 'might' be for:
1)Those who enjoy a little avant garde in their reading (a look into the art scene in New York City)
2) Couples in long term marriages....(who are willing to 'question' the big questions of life together)
3) The brilliant or talented person who took the road of an ordinary life
4) People who have experienced shame -- felt invisible -- or stuck in life

Here is a 'sample' of the type of writing you find in this book:

"I don't want to do 'nothing'. But I seem not to have some faculty other people have. Something that tells them to do 'this' or do 'that'. To go to medical school or join the Peace Corps or teach English as a second language. Everything seems perfectly plausible to me. And I can't quite see myself doing any of it."

[Denisa T. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Za soumraku na mě působilo podobně jako intenzivně jako Sněhová královna, ale líbilo se mi ještě o trochu víc. Bylo víc dějové, ale prostor (New York) a témata zůstávají stejná, přibylo ještě umělecké a galerijné prostředí, které mi od dob Houellebecqových Map a území učarovalo. Oceňuju taky to "otření se" o téma milostného trojúhelníku, navíc LGBT, které se podle anotace tváří jako téma hlavní, ale není tomu úplně tak. Jen se tak jemně plíží celým textem, který řeší hlavně krizi manželství a rodičovství, životní stereotyp a fungování moderního trhu s uměním.

[Fereshte]

did you know hugh dancy narrated the audiobook? like, the hell if i'm not listening to this!

[Dinah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Cunningham: count on this guy to rip your heart out every damn time. This might be my favorite yet. Kept me up all night on Christmas after the biggest, sleepiest-to-digest meal in recent memory because I just couldn't put it down.

What is there to say? His prose is absolutely delicious, maybe even more so in a novel where Cunningham isn't vying for rhetorical space with one of the many poets in his homage-based pieces. Of course it's always Cunningham, in every book, but this one leaves his talent brilliantly undiluted for the reader, frees us from having to keep the references straight from the new language (which is in no way an unpleasant reading experience, but it is less singularly rapt on one immersive narrative and world).

The brilliance of By Nightfall is almost akin to that of very good science fiction. We sit in the mind of an entirely relatable and possibly reprehensible character who seems subconsciously convinced that, in every moment, he is on the brink of ripping open everything that is pedestrian and normal and comfortable in this world. He is perpetually a half-revelation away from magic.

Cunningham's depiction of New York is as versatile and heart-rending as ever, the city's neighborhoods and instantly-recognizable denizens reflecting the characters' histories and insecurities back to them in that particular Manhattan flash of slightly-warped window glimpses, superimposed with gaudiness and art and the impossible elation of proof that you're actually here, a tiny part of such an unlikely beast. The magic that hovers just out of reach is intimately tied to this place, to its dream of itself as the maker of heroes and the banal machinery in which all New Yorkers are all ultimately cogs. The reader is dragged right into this relentless ebb and flow, from boundless possibilities of who we can become here, to the stark clarity of the tiny lives we lead, and back to the waking dream of promised transcendence in a glance or email or perfectly chosen pair of boots.

I am reminded of a point Julianne Moore made in an interview last week about film -- she attached herself to The Kids Are All Right because there are so few attempts made in mainstream culture to examine a marriage in its middle age. This book does so brilliantly, and actually it'd be great to see Moore cast in the inevitable screen adaptation. Although we'll lose the intimate, urgent turbulence of being inside the head of a husband/father/bereaved brother at a crossroads with all those identities, the story itself will flourish as a careful study of families as they age, writing and rewriting the myths of the clan and each of its members. We'll watch a forty-something man navigate his daily routine haltingly as he still struggles to define himself in each moment and, in the battle to keep his self-loathing at bay and euphoric flights of fancy in check, inadvertently loses touch with the real people who hold up his world.

Who isn't guilty of exactly this sin? We scrutinize the lives we've built and construct their narratives and key characters obsessively, until the being-ness of the people at the heart of our stories assert themselves too strongly to be rhapsodized into compliance with the way we've constructed them, and more importantly, constructed ourselves through our relationships with them. I recognize that terror so sharply, the first crack of a loved one snapping me back into reality, that moment makes the entire picture of one's world falling apart instantly visible. And the self-loathing and re-conceptualizing that comes with that, too.

There's so much more to praise... Cunningham's deft and vital probing of sexuality in his characters and the world itself; the exquisitely rendered secondary characters whose lives are unquestionably real independent of the narrative but still function dutifully as sharp snapshots in service of the central story; the delightful German office assistant who cuts through the mythic quality of the prose exactly when the reader needs a concrete narrator and world for a while.

I've managed to say nearly nothing about the story, not because it's immaterial exactly, but because it is inevitable. Cunningham makes the characters and the environments that define them (or rather, that they use to define themselves), and the rest unfolds almost effortlessly -- what else could these minds and circumstances produce? The actions and events of the novel function almost identically to its forays into memory; they live in service to the thought and the prose, providing fodder and direction but not remotely taking the helm. This book is a gem, and this author has proved yet again how many tricks are up a true novelist's sleeve.