Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday October 21, 2010
|
BY NIGHTFALL
Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 978-0374299088
256 pages
$25
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/RonCharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
What are we to make of Michael Cunningham's horny new novel about the power of beauty to rouse us from ennui? The question gets no help from the publisher, which illustrates its dark title with a funereal tulip instead of, say, the abs on Michelangelo's "David." The dust jacket describes "By Nightfall" as "heartbreaking ... full of shocks and aftershocks." But actually, it's rather witty and a little outrageous -- none of that difficult reanimation of Virginia Wolfe in "The Hours," which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, or the Whitmanian sprawl of his last novel, "Specimen Days." No, from the complex triptychs of his previous two books, Cunningham has moved to a svelte story with just a touch of actual plot about an art dealer feeling cramped by his own smallness. With its eroticized reflections on modern aesthetics and liberal guilt, it's like watching a bi-curious college professor annotate an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.
At 44, Peter Harris is contentedly married (20 years) and living in a SoHo loft that makes him feel proud if cliche. As the owner of an exclusive gallery, he glides through the wealthiest houses and apartments, ingratiating and confident in equal measure as he manages the anxieties and vanities of his artists and clients. He's "never graduated to the majors," but a few careful moves could elevate him into that rarefied realm.
One of the pleasures of this novel is Cunningham's description of these intoxicating homes, from the "insistent glittery buzz" of a Manhattan party to a rambling mansion on the coast, "all fieldstone and gables, girded on three of its four sides by verandas; contrived, somehow, with a sense of absolute authenticity." Among the many classic literary voices he channels is F. Scott Fitzgerald, simultaneously swooning over and deriding these gorgeous temples of consumerism.
And he's even better with the trophies that decorate such homes: the objects that pass through galleries like Peter's, trying to catch the eye of the right editor, the right curator or a handful of influential critics who can transform, say, a giant ball of tar and hair into a multimillion-dollar masterpiece. Cunningham moves fluently through this occult world of fortune and taste, demonstrating his appreciation for modern art and his disdain for the lacquer of hucksterism. He can riff brilliantly on the bizarre work of Damien Hirst (remember that shark in formaldehyde) just as confidently as he can make up his own artists and slot their pieces into the cult of beauty, shock and excess money.
We meet Peter when he's quietly mulling over the dissatisfactions of his life, among them the nagging worry that he's failed his college-aged daughter and the sense that he's not quite ambitious enough or vulgar enough to rise higher. After a "lifelong, congenital disappointment," a deeper thirst is troubling him, too, a desperate desire for a kind of beauty that seems out of reach: "He can't stop himself from mourning some lost world, he couldn't say which world exactly but someplace that isn't this."
Yes, this is another midlife crisis novel (a crowded market if there ever was one), but it's redeemed by the hero's willingness to mock his preciousness, to recognize the audacity of even a sliver of discontent amid such bounty. During a night of queasy insomnia Peter thinks, "How could he, could any member of the .00001 percent of the prospering population, dare to be troubled ...? He is impossibly fortunate; frighteningly fortunate. Your troubles, little man? Think of them as an appetizer that didn't turn out quite right. You should sing and frolic, you should make obeisance to any god you can think of."
While Jonathan Franzen -- God bless him -- is still pumping away at the big-plotted novel, several other super-sophisticated writers have published books this year about middle-aged men studying their navels: I'm thinking of James Hynes' "Next," Jonathan Lethem's "Chronic City" and Joshua Ferris' "The Unnamed" -- a mixed bag, to be sure, but all plot-starved books that put tremendous pressure on the author's style. In that regard, Cunningham reigns supreme. There are flashier, more pyrotechnic stylists, but for pure, elegant, efficient beauty, Cunningham is astounding. He's developed this captivating narrative voice that mingles his own sharp commentary with Peter's mock-heroic despair. Half Henry James, half James Joyce, but all Cunningham, it's an irresistible performance, cerebral and campy, marked by stabbing moments of self-doubt immediately undercut by theatrical asides and humorous quips.
Peter, you see, is a man burdened with hyper-self-analysis that delivers every personal insight gilded with irony. He reflexively thinks of himself and those around him in terms of literary characters and mythologized historical figures. They crowd his imagination (and these pages), from Isabel Archer to Dorothea Brooke, Helen and the Trojans, Ludwig of Bavaria, Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, Dante and Beatrice.
But what gives the novel its considerable frisson is the intrusion of Peter's impossibly seductive, much younger brother-in-law. Nicknamed Mizzy ("The Mistake"), Ethan is a bisexual drug addict who's sucked up his family's money and affection for years. He wants to crash with his sister and Peter while he figures out what he'd like to do next -- maybe "Something in the Arts." Till then, he'll just tiptoe around the apartment in full-frontal Grecian splendor and masturbate in his room. Peter reacts with politely repressed disdain, but the young man's beauty quickly overwhelms him and soon he's fantasizing about touching Mizzy's "pallid, fine-boned prettiness," his "slumbering perfection. ... It had seemed to him that angels might look like this."
How gay is it?
That's Peter's question, but ours, too, as the novel becomes increasingly flamboyant, giving itself over to a lush internal melodrama, "the painful gorgeousness of caring that much." Of course, Peter is self-aware enough to acknowledge the homosexual component of his attraction, but he also sees his brother-in-law, this "beautiful princeling," as a long-lost work of art, the perfect object that demolishes everything and remakes his world.
This is not an easy argument to make with a straight -- or gay -- face. There's a touch of "I buy Playgirl for the articles" here, and Cunningham pushes hard on celebrating a kind of beauty that transcends mere sexual desire. Even without a death in Venice, it gets a bit overwrought, though only in ways that Cunningham anticipates and acknowledges -- all "very nineteenth century," as a discreet colleague observes. While the drama between Peter and his feckless brother-in-law is arresting, it can't really rise to tragedy or romance or even scandal because Peter is too self-conscious of the situation's competing meanings: psychological, aesthetic and farcical. "He's a poor, funny little man, isn't he?" he says of himself toward the end, but most of us poor, funny little people don't have Peter's capacity to simultaneously critique and star in our own psychosexual crises.
If the novel's final revelation seems a bit bland, it's more than compensated for by the insight and humor that come before. Admittedly, "By Nightfall" doesn't have the emotional breadth of "The Hours," but it's a cerebral, quirky reflection on the allure of phantom ideals and even, ultimately, on what a traditional marriage needs to survive.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
RIVERS OF GOLD
Adam Dunn
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978-1608193073
276 pages
$25
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who reviews mysteries and thrillers regularly for The Washington Post.
This being a political season, we are endlessly assured that recovery is near, that prosperity is just around the corner, that happy days will soon be here again ... if we cast our ballots correctly. Adam Dunn, the author of this often brilliant first novel, "Rivers of Gold," is having none of it. He sets his story in Manhattan three years from now -- 2013 -- when the Great Recession has become the New Depression; famous restaurants, hotels, stores and theaters are shuttered; riots have broken out; a shantytown has sprung up in Central Park; and thousands of municipal employees, including police, have been laid off, sending the crime rate to new peaks.
But don't despair, folks: The Palin-Limbaugh ticket has just taken over the White House.
(Sorry, the devil made me write that last bit.)
Dunn's guide to this grave new world is green-eyed, 118-pound, 25-year-old Reynolds (Renny) Taylor, who divides his time between high-fashion photography and high-end drug-dealing. Both pursuits carry him into a world of hip young things with money, and both help him maintain a frenzied sex life. The novel's early sections suggest an updating of the urban decadence we've seen before in books like Jay McInerny's "Bright Lights, Big City" and Bret Easton Ellis' "Less Than Zero." Dunn's young people frequent illegal clubs and slurp down drinks that you and I never heard of ("ginger-pear-basil-aspic martinis," a "caipirinha," "truffle-oil infused Absolut 100 shots"). But there's a new desperation here: "Life in the Big Apple in 2013 isn't about pride or principles," Renny tells us, "it's about survival."
Dunn finds a certain mad humor in Renny's hectic life. The lad often speeds about the city in taxis and has developed rules for Taxi Sex, which are highly practical but mostly unrepeatable here. Renny actually gets sweet on a tawny beauty he calls N (he gives women letters, which is slightly more gentlemanly than numbers), who has "AETAS ANIMA" tattooed on an intimate portion of her anatomy. When N unwisely shows signs of possessiveness (she asks Renny how many women he's had sex with that month), he has his answer ready: "I think that people need to collide, to bounce off each other a few times, in order to determine if they're really a good fit for combining. If not, it's best to Keep Moving." A rule to live by, verily, but lest he alienate the delightful N, Renny gives her a gift that keeps on giving, a platinum-plated vibrator. Dunn's sex scenes are a highlight of the book; they provide tasty glimpses of the bizarre, rather than boring descriptions of the same-old same-old.
All this is good fun, if you're not uptight about sex, drugs and youthful decadence.
I could have happily gone on seeking vicarious thrills in Renny's orgiastic lifestyle, but Dunn has something more ambitious in mind. He wants to show us that Renny is an unwitting bit player in a much larger drama, and to do that, he introduces four more characters, two cops and two criminals. One of the cops is Detective Sixto Santiago, part of a plainclothes unit that tries to keep Manhattan at least safe for tourists; he's big, tough, cynical and honest. He's also most unhappy about being partnered with a gun-crazy madman named More, a one-time Special Forces sniper in Afghanistan who's been detailed by the Pentagon to the NYPD to seek out foreign influences in the New York drug trade.
Those influences do exist, in Reza, a Bulgarian immigrant turned taxi driver and drug kingpin who is Renny's drug boss, and in The Slav, once a bloodthirsty Russian commander in Chechnya, now the leader of an international crime syndicate in New York. These are ruthless men. The Slav, we're told, "looked like an early amphibian that had clawed its way out of the primordial sea, stood on dry land for the first time, and decided then and there that it all belonged to him." Poor Renny is soon running for his life.
Dunn takes pains to develop these cops and criminals; indeed, I think he tells us more than we need to know about most of them. Still, there is some wildly inventive writing in this novel -- "future noir" one early reader called it -- and we do find ourselves worrying about whether the relatively decent Renny can survive in this jungle. Dunn is a talented writer, and "Rivers of Gold" will be talked about, deservedly.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
THE BELLSTHE BELLS
Richard Harvell
Crown
ISBN 978-0307590527
374 pages
$24
Reviewed by Nancy Robertson. Robertson is a producer of "The Diane Rehm Show."
Richard Harvell's first novel, "The Bells," offers lessons on the experience of music, the appeal of opera and the human cost of art. The story describes the tumultuous life of Moses Froben, "who could make ladies swoon with a mere wave of his hand, who could bring an audience to tears with his voice."
Froben's tale begins in a small village in the Swiss Alps, known for having the "Loudest and Most Beautiful Bells Ever." His mother, a "deaf idiot girl," was the only person in town who could ring the bells without damaging her ears. Hearing her ring them while he was in the womb gave Moses an extraordinary ability to discern sounds. This gift proves to be both a blessing and a curse.
The novel's central motif comes from the tale of Orpheus, the great musician of Greek mythology, who charmed his way into the underworld and begged the gods with music to bring his wife back to life. Harvell says the inspiration for his book came from the opera "Orpheus and Eurydice," by German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck. It premiered in Vienna in 1762 with the lead sung by Gaetano Guadagni, one of the most popular castrato singers of the time. In 18th-century Europe, castrati, also known as "musicos" or "angels," were the rock stars of their day. But unlike Michael Jackson, David Bowie and other modern gender-bending performers, a castrato's androgynous appeal depended upon a cruel cut of the knife.
The plot of "The Bells" contains enough drama, tragedy, romance and silliness to please any opera lover. The Catholic Church does not come off well: Moses' life is ruined by a despicable priest, an ambitious abbot and a creepy choirmaster before he's saved by two gay monks, a dwarf and a strong-willed woman who loves him.
Harvell, an American now living in Europe, tells this story in the noble, melodramatic style of opera seria, and it takes us to such real places as the St. Gall monastery in Switzerland and Stephansdom and Burgtheater in Vienna. Gluck, Guadagni and Abbot Coelestin Gugger von Staudach all existed, but the barbaric practice that preserved Moses' perfect soprano voice was rarely performed north of the Alps. (Squeamish readers may want to skip the description at the end of Act 1.) At the peak of Italian opera's popularity in the 18th century, as many at 4,000 boys -- mostly from poor families -- were gelded each year and put in music conservatories for an arduous course of study. The operation continued to be performed in Italy until it was banned in 1870.
One of the most difficult feats Harvell accomplishes in "The Bells" is capturing the physical experience of music. It warms necks and backs, resonates in jaws and temples, and rings in chests and legs. Music fights with death, seduces a woman, guides a thief and ultimately triumphs in love. Harvell has written an entertaining and eye-opening aria of a book.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
STRANGER HERE BELOW
Joyce Hinnefeld
Unbridled
ISBN 978-1609530044
268 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who regularly reviews books for The Washington Post.
"Stranger Here Below" is a novel about civil rights in the '60s, the onset of the Vietnam War and the legacy of various American religions -- religions that may have died out but still influence how we live. The author, having made that first, ambitious set of choices, sometimes lives up to her material and sometimes does not.
"Stranger Here Below" is about Original Sin -- whatever it is that made us awful to begin with. The book takes its title from the grand old hymn: "I am a stranger here below, / And what I am 'tis hard to know; / I am so vile, so prone to sin, / I fear that I'm not born again." The story is about good people trapped in a world that really is vile, really is prone to sin. The ability to recognize what is good, and then to identify with that goodness, is all too often far harder than it seems.
In 1961, two girls enroll in Berea, a small liberal arts college in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. The campus is close to what's left of Pleasant Hill, a Shaker community. The Shakers have all died except for one very late-coming convert, Sister Georgia, who lives alone in the deserted buildings, still worshiping in her own unique way -- whirling, dancing, shaking. Over on campus, the two freshman girls gaze warily on an academic civilization that is entirely new to them.
Mary Elizabeth Cox, a naive African American, is not the first black student to have enrolled at Berea, but she is still one of only a few dozen. Her father is a strict Christian preacher; her mother has always been strange. Mary Elizabeth is the first person in her family to go to college.
Her roommate, a good-natured, rawboned blonde named Maze, short for "Amazing Grace," is also the first of her family to go to college, but she comes from a very different world. She's a mountain girl whose mother, Vista, grew up in a bleak little place. Vista was seduced by a Swedish coal miner who deserted her the day after their wedding. Vista has been forced to fend for herself and her child through the years.
Mary Elizabeth and Maze are both scholarship girls. Mary Elizabeth is a brilliant pianist, coddled by faculty and administration alike. Maze's strong suit is traditional weaving; the college maintains a "weaving cabin" where students churn out artifacts that generate income for the institution. But both girls carry disturbing subconscious inheritances. Maze's mother has worked hard for years, but has finally been rescued by the mysterious Sister Georgia, who announces that she needs a caretaker.
Mary Elizabeth's situation is more problematic. Her mother still carries the memory of a lynching that causes her to experience increasingly severe nervous breakdowns.
The author, Joyce Hinnefeld, seems to be suggesting that it's all very well to say that our national wounds are well on the way to being healed, that the races are finally getting along, but if atrocities have happened to you or someone you know, they're hard to get over. The suffering is simply too much.
Meanwhile, the Vietnam War is sneaking up on everyone. The undergraduates argue about it, but the war isn't real to them. Maze, by this time, has been turned on to the possibility of a different life. She's seen crumbling Shaker journals that list the sect's secret herbal remedies, and she realizes that if the Shakers lived off the land, the same thing is possible for herself and her classmates. She becomes conversant with Sister Georgia's spiritual beliefs -- beliefs that have kept her spiritually safe and comforted all these years. But the thing that kept the Shakers from surviving was a strictly enforced mandate against sexual activity. Maze's friends consciously and subconsciously consider that. Will their nascent back-to-the-land movement be corrupted by sex?
Maze ponders this as she watches Sister Georgia living through her last days, serenely and spiritually attuned to the world. What if Maze and her friends indeed went back to the land, farmed, made their own clothes, preserved their own food; what if they, like the Shakers, simply elected to ignore the larger questions inherent in American life?
Behind this plot, there's a strong anti-patriarchal feeling. It's the good guys against the generals, the politicians, even Mary Elizabeth's bossy Christian father. These men want life to be a certain way, their way, and these young people, if they know what's good for them, should bend their wills to that same purpose.
But it should be said that within this lofty plot and cleverly imagined characters, the author allows herself some surprising weaknesses. Sister Georgia, for instance, is an interesting fictional construct, but a self-indulgence. She doesn't really belong in the story and gets stuck with long chapters that the author seems to have inserted just because she wanted to. The book could have used a severe editor.
What really is good for us? The world, as the old hymn says, is "vile, so prone to sin. ... All feeling sense seems to be gone." We're left to fend for ourselves, to pay attention to the bits of education that seem right for us, and hope against hope that we're choosing the right path.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
 |
|
| Recent Stories |
 THE SECRET CAVE: Discovering Lascaux
WHAT HAPPENED ON FOX STREET
PROOFINESS: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception
FLORA'S VERY WINDY DAY
STALLING FOR TIME: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
