[Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2010]

by Meagan Day

With By Nightfall, Michael Cunningham solidifies his reputation as one of contemporary literature’s leading voices examining the repressed desires of the ostensibly comfortable. Peter Harris, age forty-three, is an art dealer living with his wife Rebecca, editor of an arts and culture magazine in a loft in SoHo. Peter spends much of the novel wishing an ingenious artist would drift into his life and award him and his gallery something unusual and moving. He even agrees to represent successful artists whose work he doesn’t quite admire so that he’ll have money to support this undiscovered luminary when the occasion arises. Meanwhile, Peter begins to develop a homoerotic fixation on his wife’s younger brother Mizzy, a handsome, wayward youth with a drug problem who has come to live in Peter and Rebecca’s spare room, having decided vaguely, after a failed vision-quest travel to a Japanese shrine, to do “Something in the Arts.”

In another writer’s hands, Peter might have greater power over Mizzy. After all Mizzy knows nothing about art relative to Peter’s fifteen years working with artists and art objects, drinking imported vodka at high-end art parties and developing acute, refined taste. But Cunningham’s greatest talent as a writer (demonstrated here as well as in his novels The Hours and A Home at the End of the World) is for complicating the romantic, and Peter wields no such power over his aloof and glamorously self-destructive houseguest. Instead, Mizzy sends Peter into a spiral of longing and neurotic self-doubt.

This inversion is the first hint that, despite being set in the New York art scene and populated with artists, curators, patrons and young hopefuls, this is not just a novel about art. Instead, the novel’s treatment of art is a point of entry into a conversation about youth. It’s a wonderful deception, and in turns sly and elegant, with language that is delicate without being florid, Cunningham transforms what appears to be a book about painters and curators into a treatise on the wingspan of the young and the disappointment of the aging. In one scene, Peter and a curator named Bette visit the Met together where, in front of an enormous installation piece, it dawns on him that she is closing her gallery not because she’s fed up with the rat race, as she has stated, but because her cancer has returned. She is retiring to die in peace. In the blue light of the exhibition hall, Peter notices that the skin of Bette’s hands has taken on a crepe-like texture. Here and elsewhere, Cunningham uses art as a backdrop for an inquiry into aging and death.

Peter himself is no longer young and he is beginning to notice it. He worries about the routine shape his marriage has taken, reels over a hairdresser’s suggestion that he remove his gray, feels out-of-place and passé during a nighttime foray into youthful squalor of the Lower East Side. Contrast this with a moment in his adolescence when he has a vision for the first time of mythic beauty, a moment he will attempt to replicate for the rest of his life: It is summer, and his older brother Matthew and Matthew’s best friend Joanna are wading ankle-deep before him into Lake Michigan, moments before a thunderstorm. “Peter will never fully understand why, at that ordinary moment, the world decided to reveal itself, briefly, to him.”

This scene is remarkably similar to one in The Hours, and they read together like variations on a theme, that theme being the receptiveness of youth to the world’s beauty. In The Hours, middle-aged Clarissa Vaughan remembers a moment decades ago on a beach in Wellfleet: “It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness.”

For Peter, artistic genius has novelty at its crux, and his pursuit of it betrays a desire for the world to open up, to flush with promise again. This is what original art does: it troubles the finite, suggests that the world is more vast, various and astonishing than we could’ve imagined. This sensation, this revelation, is the opposite of aging as Peter experiences it: the increased forcefulness of habit, the lessening of the world’s impact, the tapering off of wonder.

Which brings us back to Mizzy’s strange power over Peter. It’s an odd logic, but when art means youth and youth means infinite promise, which is the case at least for Cunningham’s despairing protagonists, to know nothing about art is to know as much as possible about art. Peter, with his enormous catalog of reference points, his endless ability to recall artists’ names and their career highlights, has begun to experience the erosion of a crucial knowledge: that none of it matters. The business of art has obscured for him the actual function of art, which is to surprise us, to impress upon us the world’s complexity. To remind us, against the tide of careers and routines, that the future is still unfathomable, that life remains a mystery.

Cunningham has done just that in By Nightfall. The book is remarkably intimate, Peter’s consciousness streaming convincingly from petty insecurities to morbid ruminations to erotic puzzlement. Janet Fitch writes appropriately that Cunningham “celebrates the mental flora that is the mind’s private life.” Not all of it is flattering or heroic, of course: we learn Peter’s carnal impulses, his vain neuroses, his fear of mediocrity, his mounting disappointment. We learn that he was oddly thrilled by the sight of his dead brother, and that he finds his own college-aged daughter ordinary and unlikable, and that he desperately wants to be noticed. But a change is occurring in Peter Harris. He is realizing, thanks to Mizzy and Bette and the dawning of middle age, that he wants more life—not more time to live it in, but a heightened awareness, as on the shore of Lake Michigan, that he is already living it. Whether he’s buying dental floss or watching the sleeping face of his wife’s beautiful brother, he wants to be able to remember, in moments ordinary as well as extraordinary, that his life is actually happening. And as he realizes this, perhaps so do we.

 


 
 
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