8/7/2019 JJacobs. Review of Cunningham's By Nightfall

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Jessica JacobsTruth, Beauty, and Thomas Mann:The Quests and Questions ofMichael CunninghamsBy Nightfall

Sycamore ReviewWinter/Spring 2011, 23:1

Michael CunninghamBy Nightfall: A Novel

Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, NYOctober, 2010238 Pages, $25

By Nightfall, Michael Cunninghams most recent novel, is a View-Master for ourcontemporary urban age. At its best, the overlays he presents click by in stereoscope to give uscharacters of great depth and believability; while elsewhere these same protagonists seem meretransparencies from a flimsy, two-dimensional world.

On the most readily apparent layer, we have the story of Peter and Rebecca Harris, whitemiddle-aged New Yorkers in the midst of a long marriage. Peter is an art-dealer and Rebeccaan editor, designated by their careers as seekers and midwives for what they hope is the artisticgenius of others. For Peter, this life-long quest for created beauty is both his defining quality and

the potential for his undoing, an undoing catalyzed by Mizzy (aka The Mistake aka Ethan),Rebeccas handsome but troubled youngest sibling, whose arrival in the couples home threatensto destroy their seemingly stable, if somewhat dull, idyll.

Criticism ofBy Nightfalls prose is difficult, as what can initially be read as its occasionalfailures of craft could just as likely be argued to be a skilled structural mirroring of the content itserves to deliver. For when the characters are just two, Peter and Rebecca, there is a dearth ofbelievability, a lack of momentum in their interactions. But, then again, the narrative, which istold in third-person from Peters perspective, suggests that this prosaic stasis is exactly the styletheir relationship requires, What marriage doesnt involve uncountable accretions, a language ofgestures, a sense of recognition, sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isntunhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing?

How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and liveyour life so utterly unrecognized?Therefore, the flatter writing of these sections, whether intended or not, conveyed well

this stasis of acknowledged unhappiness. However, one still couldnt help but wince at the self-reflexiveness of the line, The problem with the truth is that its so often mild and clichd.

With Mizzys arrival, Cunninghams writing quickens its pulse. In a moment of mistakenidentity, Peter comes home to find who he thinks is Rebecca in the shower and observes,Rebecca is young again. She stands in the stall facing away from Peter, her hair short, her backstrong and straight from swimming; she is half hidden by steam and for an instant it all makesimpossible sense: . . . Rebecca in the shower sluicing away the last twenty years, a girl again.She turns surprised. It isnt Rebecca. Its Mizzy. Its the Mistake. And it is from that mistaken

moment that the plot and the prose find their direction.Another of the novels touchstones is Cunninghams proclivity to draw on the writings ofothers for style, structure, and characters templatesthink Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway inThe Hours; Walt Whitmans Song of Myself in Specimen Days.By Nightfallis no exception.Though Dante pops up a number of times (the protagonists have a daughter named Beatrice) andWoolf, too, is alive and well in the parenthetical asides that scatter these pages,By Nightfallkeeps closest company with Thomas Mannboth the languid longing of his novella Death inVenice and the exploration of art and ideas in The Magic Mountain.

8/7/2019 JJacobs. Review of Cunningham's By Nightfall

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Writing a novel that relies heavily on allusions is a tricky business. While it can allow thework to tap into the current of literary history to help carry the story along, it can also give theunfortunate air of a man in last years suit, desperately dropping names in the hopes that theirinherent greatness will mask his own inadequacies.

By Nightfallwalks this line with only occasional missteps, its allusions lending the novel

its next layer: Peter is easily read as Aschenbach from Death in Venice, the lecherous poet-spokesman of all those who labour at the edge of exhaustion; and Mizzy as both Tadzio, theyouthful object of Aschenbachs misguided affection, and Hans Castorp, the unformed wayfarerofThe Magic Mountain.

The storys final overlays hover up from Peters past, cloaking and often obscuring thecharacters in their present states. The representations of Rebecca and Peter seem in perpetualflux between their current middle-aged selves and the more beautiful and idealistic lovers theyonce were. Mizzy carries an even heavier symbolic burden, alternately standing in as theyounger Rebecca; Matthew, the gay older brother Peter idolized and envied who died yearsbefore of AIDS; and the embodiment of the beauty the younger Peter once sensed in the world.

Within these strata,ByNightfallplays out its intrigue and ideas. For, in the end, it is the

novels intellectual explorations that linger, the sense that through the character of Peter,Cunningham is interrogating the place and importance of art and beauty in the world. Just as thetitleBy Nightfallcan be read in multiple waysan indication that the story contains actions andthoughts more easily performed in the dim haze of dusk, a deadline, or a Romantic calculusequating the times of day to the stages of a mans lifethe experience of reading this novelseems open to interpretation and interaction, each reader charged with the pleasurable task ofchoosing the layer on which she would most like to train her gaze.