By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham
Fourth Estate $34.99
Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours, was in debt to both life and literature. His new novel, By Nightfall, also displays a strong allegiance to both.
Cunningham has crafted a terrific story of disillusionment, middle age, beauty, desire and love with an art-world backdrop and the physical terrain of NYC.
Peter Harris, the central character, is a New York art dealer who is out of sorts but does not exactly know why. As a young man of ordinary Milwaukee origins - as he might have put it - he fell in love with Rebecca and "every single person and object" in her ramshackle family home.
After a long and comfortable marriage, Peter is besieged with little anxieties. What kind of father was he (his daughter has left home and the childhood closeness is now a troubling gap)? What kind of husband is he? What would a stranger make of his art collection? What should he wear to a fancy, up-town restaurant?
Cunningham builds his portrait of Peter through the conversations Peter has with his family, clients and friends, but he becomes doubly alive through the fretful conversations he has with himself.
This is where Peter challenges the masks and poses of those who surround him. We hear stream-of-conscious musings he has not filtered for public hearing.
He is waiting to talk to his daughter on the phone. We hear that he hopes she doesn't answer so he can leave a message. We hear that if he "were a better person" he might know where it all went wrong. She hears that he loves her.
It is never straightforward. Peter is on a conveyer belt of exhibitions, of appeasing artists' egos and steering clients to decisions. He bemoans a world of labourers and guildsmen rather than visionaries.
When Rebecca's younger brother Mizzy comes to stay, with his lack of focus and history of drug problems, his charm and his enticing beauty, Peter's world is thrown skyward.
Mizzy's choice is not to commit to a standard path tests both Rebecca and Peter. In him, Peter sees the death of his older brother Matthew, the younger self of his wife, the crowded haphazardness of the family he fell in love with, his unexpected homoerotic thoughts, his fragile self-knowledge.
Cunningham brings you to the knotty peak of the story with slow and exquisite skill. The way he moves you beyond that point of calamity is unexpected and moving.
Cunningham heightens his story with literary references; Rebecca's mother is compared to Madame Bovary, his brother and friend to Dante and Beatrice.
This is a book that unzips you as Mizzy unzipped Peter and Rebecca - it reminds you not to take daily ordinariness for granted. It's a gem.
Paula Green is an Auckland poet and author.
