Book: By Nightfall
Author: Michael Cunningham
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Pages: 238
Price: Rs395
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michel Cunningham, best known for his Virginia Woolf-inspired novel The Hours, prefaces his latest novel with a line from Rainer Maria Rilke: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.”
It may as well read: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of error”.
The first character we are introduced to, the one who will turn gallery owner Peter Harris’s world inside out, is called The Mistake, or Mizzy for short. Mizzy is Peter’s brother-in-law, his wife Rebecca’s much younger sibling. He’s coming to stay with the Harrises in Manhattan, infesting their suave art-and-publishing lives with his fiscal irresponsibility, his drug addiction, and his hotness. Peter Harris — husband and father, pillar of the art world, savvy businessman — is about to fall in love with his wife’s adored and over-indulged kid brother.
It’s an intriguing premise, but By Nightfall is a more complicated novel than that. It begins by seeming to be about the dramatic lure of homosexual sort-of-incest, but ends up being about the chronic, low-grade attrition of neglect. Peter is haunted by the memory of his own gay elder brother, Matthew, who died young of AIDS. He is haunted, too, by the sense that he could disappear without leaving a trace, haunted by distorted reflections of himself in steamy mirrors and darkened windows. He’s haunted by the stirrings of passion he feels for Mizzy. He’s so haunted, in fact, that he misses the present unfolding under his nose.
He finally wakes from the whirl of work and his fantasies about himself, to register the wrecked relationships around him: his “increasingly remote wife”, his utterly remote daughter Bea, the impossibility of his love for Mizzy. Cunningham writes: “Oh, little man. You have brought down your house not through passion but by neglect. You who dared to think of yourself as dangerous. You are guilty not of the epic trangressions but the tiny crimes. You have failed in the most base and human of ways — you have not imagined the lives of others.”
As in The Hours, Cunningham compresses the action into a short period of time, and draws out the novel through background and memory. It’s an interesting device, but his insistent style (“And here, on this cold night, are Peter and Rebecca, in their familiar bedroom.” “Here is Peter’s art, then.”) can occasionally grate. You might forgive Cunningham for that, on the grounds that this novel is, after all, concerned with bearing witness — the basic human act of empathy in the face of an uncaring universe.
But there are other irritants: a mob of cardboard cut-out characters you’ll never meet twice, a penchant for parentheses and italics, a narrative consciousness that drifts in and out of Peter’s own for no discernible reason, and an earnestness about the art world that occasionally teeters on the brink of parody.
By Nightfall is certainly a literary novel in its acuity and precision and insight, in its references to Joyce and Fitzgerald. But it suffers from a kind of airless, fun-less primness about its own project. It would be an interesting meditation on marriage and relationships if it didn’t feel so much like a self-conscious exposition on how to Write About Art in the Larger Sense of the Word.
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