By Nightfall – Christine Horvath

Book Review >>> Christine Horvath By Nightfall

Michael Cunningham. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 238 pp.

Spinning Unknowable Fantasies

Michael Cunningham’s sexy and scandalous latest work is, if nothing else, a quick read. He chronicles the life of forty-something Peter Harris who, after a lifetime of fulfillment finally realizes that he is not satisfied. Peter lives with his wife Rebecca in New York City. They work equally impressive jobs, an art gallery curator and editor of a magazine, respectively. Years before the story begins, their estranged daughter Bea moves to Boston to attend school. Peter and Rebecca are then empty-nesters, left to long-distance parenting… until Mizzy arrives. Their new houseguest is Rebecca’s brother Ethan. He is nicknamed “Mizzy,” short for “The Mistake.” What follows is a predictable tale about the hardships of housing a troubled youth, parental failure and mid-life crises. This novel’s main plot is driven by Peter Harris’s obsession with beauty. As a curator, he is exposed to various and sundry works of art on a daily basis; his job is to decide what is beautiful enough to be in his gallery. Through Peter, Cunningham echoes a popular belief of our time that real art is either commoditized or non-existent. Subsequently, Peter’s preoccupation with finding real beauty creates his greatest conflicts. As the reader navigates Cunningham’s prose, he/she will begin to realize the extent of Peter’s distorted conception of art. All good art should represent life, but the only art that Peter finds beautiful throughout the text can only occur organically in nature. For example, one of his clients describes a newly laid egg: “[it was] an impossibly, heartbreakingly pale blue-green, specked with scraps of feather, smeared along its obverse end with a skid-mark of red-brown blood. And Peter had said, … I’d love to find an artist who could do something like this” (71). Exemplified here is Peter’s unrealistic expectation of art that humans are capable of creating. One gets the sense that if an artist did create something similar to the newly-laid egg that Peter would not be satisfied with the synthetic creation. Therefore, it is not beauty that Peter yearns for in art, it is life. Because life cannot possibly be frozen into a piece of artwork, reality will forever fall short of Peter’s expectations. His inability to be satisfied with the subject of his life’s work causes Peter to exaggerate, even obsess over the beauty that he finds in living things, especially youthful things. As the narrative progresses, Peter becomes infatuated with the idea of his wife’s bygone youth. Youth becomes a major theme in the work, as Peter describes it as “the only sexy tragedy” (120). Matthew, Peter’s older brother, died at a young age. Throughout the reader’s glimpse of Peter’s life, he struggles to overcome the grief of his brother dying but instead worships his unsalvageable youth.

More than anything, though, Peter is taken by Mizzy. Mizzy represents what it is to be in an early, unprepared stage of life. He treats Mizzy as a long-lost son and a recreation of his brother, among other things. Again, Peter misunderstands and romanticizes something that he perceives as beautiful. Mizzy had a chance at a very productive life but after a series of dropouts and mistakes, has let it all go. We’re told, “[Peter’s] aroused by Mizzy’s youth… he’s aroused by the memory of having been young” (117). Suddenly, Peter has forgotten the terror of being in a transitional stage in life. He has become intoxicated with the idea of youth and pines to be young again. He lives vicariously through Mizzy, yet fails to recognize that Peter has all that Mizzy can wish to have at this stage in his life: a good job, a solid relationship, stability. Mizzy explains, “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 that. To go to medical school or join the Peace Corps. Everything seems perfectly plausible to me. And I can’t quite see myself doing any of it” (191). While Peter should be telling Mizzy to grow up, he wishes to be young again. Rebecca tells Peter that she wants to be free like Mizzy. These adults casually ignore Mizzy’s fear of becoming like them: middle-aged, unhappy and unfulfilled with a perfectly full life. His fear paralyzes him from doing anything so as not to have wasted his never-returning youth. Wanting to go back to the moment of terror that these characters have already transcended seems bratty and delusional. Seeing what they want to see is convenient for them, but for the reader it is utterly intolerable. The characters leave much to be desired but the prose is undeniably brilliant. This book is not for the “Literarily Inept,” that is, its highbrow references make this a rather intellectual read. Cunningham employs characters and settings from works such as The Bible, Ulysses and The Great Gatsby, among others. Cunningham’s sentences are eloquently constructed and his wit shines in a few moments of brilliance. Specifically, one of Peter’s clients frankly describes a work as “beautiful and nasty,” a rare moment of intentional humor that the book has to offer (195). The writing is enjoyable and easy to read, yet the narrative occasionally drags. Cunningham includes much extraneous information regarding Peter’s work, such as conversations between Peter and his clients that add little to nothing to the story itself. The themes become exhausted throughout the second half of the novel, irony and youth being laid on pretty thick by the end. Overall, the book is underwhelming at best and can even be aggravating, especially for college students who are tirelessly worrying about the next stage in their lives.