BY NIGHTFALL BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

BY NIGHTFALL BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

 

A Review by

Claire Howorth - Arts Editor, The Daily Beast

     John Keats’ “truth and beauty” have surfaced in many a writer’s works—most recently, the poet Anne Carson (The Beauty of the Husband) and novelist Ann Patchett (Truth & Beauty). Now, Michael Cunningham’s spectacular new novel, By Nightfall, takes a crack at that theme from Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Peter and Rebecca Harris are an averagely very successful New York couple (but being so, perhaps aren’t so attuned to their own good fortune), and have raised a smart but homely daughter, Bea, who attends Boston College. Peter has an art gallery, and Rebecca runs an arts magazine, Blue Light—in keeping with the times, the publication is completely on the skids. Then there’s Mizzy—the “mistake” whose nickname is as much a mark of the past as it is a harbinger—Rebecca’s little brother, a brilliant, druggie Adonis, barely older than Bea.

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Mizzy embodies beauty, as Peter’s tragic misfortune will have it; the truth upends his life and, regularly throughout the book, the contents of his stomach. To great effect, Cunningham plays with the correspondence between the corporeal and the emotional.

By Nightfall reaches its zenith as Peter is hitting bottom; the writing is painful, funny, and perfect. One particularly sad, hilarious scene is a memory Peter has of his adolescent love, a Midwestern beauty who comes along on family vacation. Peter takes the opportunity to wallow in his adulation:

“He not only sniffed the bikini bottoms she’d slung over the porch rail to dry… but, with the queasy disregard of an alcoholic at a dinner party, put them over his head. Yes, he felt life cracking open all around him, and yes there were times when he wished Joanna would go away because he wasn’t certain he could bear his own deep knowledge… that he was and would always be a little boy with a bikini bottom stretched over his head, and that as intoxicating as these days of Joanna were they were also the beginning of a lifelong, congenital disappointment.”

That little boy with bikini bottoms stretched across his head grows up into the central character and limited viewpoint for By Nightfall, which unfolds largely in the present, and by dialogue. No coincidence that it conjures up the feeling of a script: Cunningham has written successful screenplays for his own books, The Hours and A Home at the End of the World, and Evening, with Susan Minot.

Cunningham harvested the fertile fields of literature du jour: the middling middle age, in the here and now, of urbane (or drop the “e” if you wish) America; Claire Messud and Jonathan Franzen have duly demonstrated just how plentiful that terrain is.

By Nightfall impresses a sense of mourning for the intangible, somehow linking it back to those twin Keatsian themes. Fittingly enough, an actual urn materializes toward the end of the book. Remarks one character, “It’s so beautiful and nasty.”

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by The Daily Beast

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