A few weeks ago, when BrianR stopped in Boston as part of his big tour, he and Paul and I went to the Boston Public Library to hear Michael Cunningham read from his new novel, By Nightfall. Paul and I got inscribed copies at the end of the reading. I have since read it and actually could not believe how much I came to like it. I had read the first part of A Home at the End of the World (1990); I had not read The Hours (1998). Frankly, the first chapter of By Nightfall even as read by the author was not strongly inclining me to read it, but following an instinct I re-read that chapter myself, persisted with the rest and was rewarded with a story that kept drawing me in more and more. Now that I have finished it, I am at the stage where I am going back to reread different places and think about how concentrated it is, how he makes everything contribute to the whole, how there is a new thought or effect on every page, how involving and plausible and thought-provoking it all is.
The story of A Home at the End of the World was spread over years, and I know from reading about it that The Hours is juxtaposing the lives of three women in successive generations. Cunningham is attempting something new with each novel, and By Nightfall is short, unified, and linear. It takes place in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Greenwich CT over just a few days, with only three central characters. His subject is a kind of experience many middle-aged people go through, though Peter Harris' version of it is very specific to who he is as an individual, and what he is expecting (and not getting) from life. I was at page 50 before I got in tune with the theme and started to see how every part of the novel was connected, how all the symbols drove the story into a single course while being completely ordinary, realistic parts of his life at the same time. In the end, the story was only limited by the realism of the outcome, which is no limitation at all.
This is the kind of story Ang Lee has such a genius for turning into unforgettable films. There are so many projects I wish he would do, darn it! But the book has some remarkable passages which, even if they inspired the director to come up with some amazing visual/aural equivalent, also need to be appreciated just as writing.