By Nightfall [Paperback]

The play of emotions and themes with which Michael Cunningham is most adroit -- love, loss, desire, despair, mortality -- are again engaged in his new novel set in present-day Manhattan. But take note: the epigraph Cunningham has chosen for "By Nightfall" is a line from Rilke's "Duino Elegies": "Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror." That, Cunningham signals, will be the novel's all-encompassing theme: the pursuit, use, and misuse of beauty.

The principal characters in "By Nightfall" are Peter Harris, a 44-year-old contemporary art dealer, and his wife Rebecca, an editor of an arts and culture magazine. As a gallery owner, Peter's occupation is that of a "servant of beauty." He has begun to suffer existential dread: "[a] conviction, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, that some terrible, blinding beauty is about to descend and, like the wrath of God, suck [the world] all away, orphan us, deliver us, leave us wondering how exactly we're going to start it all over again."

The plot, modestly scaled, is set in motion by the appearance of Rebecca's much younger brother Ethan (age 23), a beautiful but flawed and directionless young man who's interested in doing "something in the arts." Ethan's brief stay with the couple in their spacious SoHo loft will upend all three lives.

"By Nightfall" is written in a combination of voices: at times there is a third person omniscient narrator, sometimes a second person interlocutor, but principally we are caught within Peter's own ruminations. The lasting effect is a story told through Peter's eyes. While this brings a unity to the novel, it also can be a handicap. When events, ideas and emotions come to us filtered through his fears and sensibilities, the narrative sometimes falls into a rut, trapped by the insular sound of Peter conducting a hothouse conversation with himself. The reader yearns for more self-sufficiency on the part of other characters -- persons we are meant to, and want to, care about. Happily, Cunningham is terrific with dialog, and the frequent conversational segments -- animated, stylish, and verbally agile (these are New Yorkers, after all) -- oxygenate the narrative.

Cunningham's most popular novel, "The Hours," gained strength from the interconnectedness, across time and space, of three extraordinary women. The new novel, less ambitious and focused on one man, does not achieve similar standing. This is not surprising when you consider the following thought that comes into Peter's mind -- a view, I suspect, shared by the author:

"We--we men--are the frightened ones, the blundering and nervous ones; if we act the skeptic or the bully sometimes it's because we suspect we're wrong in some deep incalculable way that women are not. Our impersonations are failing us and our vices and habits are ludicrous and . . . we have no idea about anything that actually matters."

Some are likely to dismiss "By Nightfall" as privileged and claustrophobic, but I think enough others will have a different take. Yes, the setting and tone are highly literary, with frequent allusions to high culture sources ("Ulysses" and "The Dead"; "The Great Gatsby"; "Death in Venice"; the real-life doomed affair of Rimbaud and Verlaine). That's what you expect from Michael Cunningham. But at the same time, in what is one of his shortest novels, Cunningham manages to cover a broad range of topics of interest to many readers, not the least of which is relationships. When tracing Peter and Rebecca's histories, Cunningham uses his extraordinary skill at conveying the enduring connections within families. He is best with younger characters, especially sibling relationships. He traces the pangs of growth beyond adolescence as surely as he captures our fears of growing old and dying.

You cannot gainsay the beauty of Cunningham's writing, his knack for filling in the perfect detail, his intelligence and empathy. As for magic, Cunningham convincingly creates a bevy of working artists who are part of Peter's world, devising for each a unique aesthetic and then conjuring up rooms full of their artworks, all minutely described. Other reviewers will doubtless cite their own favorite passages, but for me the one that stands out is a terrific set piece in which we follow the footsteps of the insomniac Peter in the wee hours of the night as he meanders through the irregular streets of lower Manhattan. It is an unexpected, charmed sequence.

Cunningham once introduced the author Joan Didion at a public ceremony with this observation: "Our most significant writers record us for future generations." With that in mind, I think we would do right to add "By Nightfall" to the record.

I thought The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, and Specimen Days were all wonderful. By Nightfall has the same beautiful prose, but it lacks many elements that make the others great.

For one, the characters just aren't that likable. In every other one of his novels, I could find something to relate to or sympathize with in every man, woman, gay, straight, young, old, contemporary, historic person. In By Nightfall, I found Peter to be pathetic, his wife flat, and his brother-in-law a whiny child.

I also like Cunningham for the deep ideas he can effortlessly mix into his stories. In this case, it was more like he was trying to mix a story into his deep idea, and it was unsuccessful. There was too much thinking about life and beauty and not enough life and beauty actually happening. On top of that, the constant musing nature let to redundant vocabulary--evanescent, crepuscular, ineffably. I like a perfect word as much as (if not more than) the next person, but when I start noticing the same words being repeated, that tells me you're trying to stretch a 30-page idea into a 230-page novel. Kind of jarring.

Perhaps I shouldn't fault Cunningham for trying to move on and do something new (based on this novel, perhaps HE is having an existential crisis over the nature of his own art), but at the same time, I really miss the triangular, interweaving stories that spoke more to me than this forceful presentation of a theme.

I did not find any of the characters, including the often naked young man with the nice ass (God help me) appealing; nor interesting. After endless paragraphs describing in detail the colors of every (or so it seems) neighborhood in New York City, including some of the outer boroughs, the story picks up; although before reaching the end, there is still interrupting, interfering stream of consciousness from not only the protagonist but from the narrator, sounding exactly alike. Without all of this--without the Tom Ford suits and the Prada skirt and the name of every taxi driver--it would have made a good short story. Instead, the endless parade of marching phrases, separated from one another by commas and semicolons--so that the punctuation becomes another character? or perhaps a Greek chorus?--and yet connected through the listing of everything that might make them the same; or different, if you fear death. (And isn't it human to be afraid? Especially of death.) The pseudo-philosophical ramblings on art are tepid and grow tedious (and I majored in art). The openings of parentheses are to lead us into Peter's mind, but when there are (sometimes) five to a sentence, all insipid, they do not close fast enough for me. No thought can be said once but must be doubled, perhaps tripled, with another way of saying exactly the same thing. Still. Each sentence, every word is carefully selected, almost religiously (maybe), as though it were measured by a metronome. The book is WRITTEN. And it is a chore to read.

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