Ancient inquiries

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," John Keats famously wrote, with all the naive determination of a 23-year-old Romantic poet. Unfortunately, it's not that simple, as Michael Cunningham well knows.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's sixth novel, By Nightfall, is an engrossing story that contemplates the elusive presence of beauty in the contemporary world and its power to shake us from languor, if only fleetingly.

The narrative centers on Peter and Rebecca, a married couple in their mid-40s living in New York City, where he is an art dealer and she the editor of an art magazine. Though they are ostensibly satisfied empty-nesters, their life together teeters on the brink of unhappiness.

Rebecca's younger brother Ethan, a beautiful Yale drop-out in his early twenties, staggering with heroin addiction and genius, comes to stay with Peter and Rebecca, who believes she can lead the wayward boy down the path to stability. Peter finds release for his middle-aged moroseness in a homosexual affair with Ethan that - with the exception of one kiss - takes place completely in Peter's imagination.

By Nightfall
By Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2010
238 pages

Literary events

Michael Cunningham in Prague
Nov. 4: American Center at 6; free
Nov. 5: Viola Theater at 8; 150 Kč
Nov. 6: Café Louvre at 6; free

Readers of Cunningham's work will get the opportunity to meet him in person, as the author comes to Prague this week as a guest of the Prague Writers' Festival Foundation.
Cunningham will appear at the American Center for a discussion Nov. 4. The following day at Viola Theater, he will read from By Nightfall accompanied by Czech pianist Emil Viklický. A discussion with the author in the downstairs gallery at Café Louvre Nov. 6 will feature simultaneous Czech translation. See Pwf.cz for more information.

Mácha revisited
A new edition of Karel Hynek Mácha's famous epic "May" is being released in English translation by Prague's Twisted Spoon Press this week. Translator Marcela Sulak will be reading from the poem, and copies of the book will be on sale. Nov. 7 at Friends Coffee House; free. For more information, see Alchemy-prague.com.

Ethan is creation incarnate, a wild Rimbaud shaking Peter and Rebecca from their settled lethargy as he makes his way toward what will certainly be an early, tragic end. Cunningham's sense for detail, and his ability - which is essentially poetic - to imbue objects and characters with emotional and conceptual resonance is put to the test with Ethan, whom the author attempts to use to represent raw, unfocused passion without turning him into a mouthpiece.

Cunningham uses works of art - and there are several in the novel, including famous pieces such as Damian Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living - as sparks for extended meditations on beauty and mortality that would be cumbersome without such props to aide them. The first of such episodes takes place early in the novel, when Peter and his friend Bette, who has recently been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see Hirst's famous shark immersed in formaldehyde.

"? the shark's jaws gape - there are the rows of lethal, serrated teeth, and beyond, pickled white, is the orifice itself, ? grayed and deepened, as it receded into the shark's own inner darkness," Peter observes.

The shark here is a symbol of death, the unknown and foreboding: everything Peter is afraid to talk about with his dying friend. Nearby stands a Rodin bronze of a young man frozen, pure forever; an obvious but not completely dissimilar contrast to Hirst's piece.

Cunningham is less successful when he attempts to use his characters as stepping stones for such meditation. Characters - unlike works of art that are static and heightened from life - are not intended to handle such emotional and conceptual weight and therefore falter beneath the author's assignations.

One of Cunningham's guides for By Nightfall is Thomas Mann's novel Death in Venice. Ethan is a stand-in for Tadzio, the young Polish boy in Mann's tale who infatuates the middle-aged writer Gustav von Aschenbach, eventually unraveling him. Cunningham alludes to Mann's novel several times in By Nightfall, but these allusions seem more like an inside joke than an homage, and unlike Mann's Aschenbach, Peter fails to arouse the feeling that he is putting everything on the line for the object of his desire - which is never fully developed or expressed.

Cunningham's primary success in By Nightfall is the ease with which he raises the novel's significant themes while keeping the narrative grounded in everyday detail. This novel - as all great novels - is essentially a tool for contemplation of eternal questions, but remains marvelously grounded in the quotidian, as Peter's panicked inner monologues unfold in places like Starbucks.

The curious, fleeting nature of truth and beauty is not a novel subject for fiction, and By Nightfall is not a strikingly original novel. Cunningham offers a modern approach to ancient inquiries and shows that these concepts are as relevant as ever, and as difficult to reconcile. 

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com