Promising little, delivering nothing

FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews By NightfallBy Michael Cunningham Fourth Estate, 238pp. £16.99

WHAT IS THERE TO SAY? This is a nonsense of a novel, as irritating and as archly knowing as it is pretentious. Michael Cunningham's first novel since Specimen Days, in 2005, promises little and delivers nothing. It simply drifts in and out of one's mind. The jacket notes even omit, when describing Peter, the central character, as childless, that he does have a daughter, the unhappy Bea.

Peter is an art dealer – not one of the major players on the New York art scene, but he appears to be comfortable. He is 44 and married to Rebecca, now 41 and no longer as beautiful as she once was. Beauty is a major theme in this novel; possibly, in the absence of anything remotely interesting, it is the only theme.

The couple live in their loft. He is about to acquire a promising younger artist from a friend, another dealer, Bette, who is ill and about to retire, while the self-contained Rebecca is attempting to save her floundering art magazine and is about to meet with a potential investor. The couple indulge each other mildly selfishly. It is all very calculated.

The main event, such as it is, is announced in the opening sentence. “The Mistake is coming to stay for a while.” The Mistake is also known as Mizzy, and Mizzy is a he. Midway through the first page Cunningham hints at the level of writing we are to expect in a narrative of asides. “An elderly bearded man in a soiled, full-length down coat, grand in his way (stately, plump Buck Mulligan?), pushes a grocery cart full of various somethings in various trash bags, going faster than any of the cars.”

En route to a party Peter and Rebecca are caught in a cab in heavy traffic caused by the death of a Central Park horse. Within the confines of their taxi this busy couple have time to talk; Rebecca is concerned about her much younger brother, who is coming to stay. Peter demonstrates the sledgehammer subtlety that guides him through life: “You probably can’t help him change his life, if he doesn’t want to himself. I mean, a drug addict is a sort of bottomless pit.” Rebecca doesn’t agree. “He’s been clean for a whole year. When do we stop calling him a drug addict?” In one of what become the frequent authorial asides, Cunningham races in to assist Peter and us, by tuning in to Peter’s thoughts: “Is he getting sanctimonious? Is he just spouting 12-step truisms he’s picked up God knows where?”

Beauty and appearances dominate, and there is also the seething resentment of the fortysomething for the twentysomething; Cunningham also takes on married sex: “Now it’s time to break formation, and take off their clothes. A pleasure of marriage – it doesn’t have to be seamless anymore. The slow strip is no longer necessary. You can just stop, remove what needs removing, and continue . . .”

Directly from the beginning, Cunningham makes it impossible to believe in this couple; his handling of them as the parents of an unhappy daughter now living with an older woman in far-away Boston is even clumsier. Rebecca is far more concerned about her brother than she is about her child.

Yet the story is irrelevant: it is the tone and prose style that irritate, the wry asides and relentless art history and literary cross references tossed into what is a very second-rate salad.

Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his fourth novel, The Hours, although A Home at the End of the World(1990) and his finest book to date, Flesh and Blood(1995), are better novels. He does possesses an habitual archness of tone, he can be overly playful and his humour is not all that funny, but this slight new novel does him no service at all, reflecting poorly on his talents. He does not even attempt to conceal Peter's boredom and preoccupation with his own ageing. When the Mistake – so named because his arrival was belated and unexpected in a family of three teenage girls – arrives, it is obvious that he represents sexual temptation.

However, Mizzy’s first thought is a call to his drug dealer. He is unaware that Peter is at home. Therein begins the conspiracy: two men intent on keeping a secret from one woman – Rebecca – a sister, an ageing wife. Peter begins to view his brother-in-law as his wife restored to youth and beauty. Then, behold, a subplot. Peter had previously experienced this intense sexual response with his now dead, also beautiful, elder brother, Matthew. Flashbacks follow, and they do nothing to salvage an already weak narrative. Mizzy walks around the apartment naked. Later, when accompanying Peter on a visit to a wealthy client, there is a kiss. It is obvious to all but Peter what Mizzy is doing.

Cunningham is not really telling a story. He wants to create an impression of what it is like to enter the thoughts of another person. The problem here is that the mind we are privy to is so banal that the reading experience becomes an embarrassment.

“. . . there is something thrilling about downing a shot of vodka with another man who happens to be naked. There is the covert brotherliness of it, a locker-room aspect, the low, masculine, eroticized love-hum that’s not so much about the flesh as it is about the commonality.”

Elsewhere Peter muses about Manet.

“Hardly anyone knows anymore, and no one cares, that Olympia was Manet’s whore; although there’s every reason to imagine that, in life, she was foolish and vulgar and not entirely hygienic (Paris in the 1860s being what it was) . . .”

References to F Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann are littered here and there. Near the end of the narrative Peter – or perhaps it is actually the author in yet another pseudo-philosophical meaning-of-life interlude – asks: “What do you do when you’re no longer the hero of your own story? You shut down for the night and go home to your wife, right? You have a martini, order dinner. You read or watch television. You are Brueghel’s tiny Icarus, drowning unnoticed in a corner of a vast canvas on which men till fields and tend sheep.” Cunningham aspires to jaunty profundity, yet it all falls flat. Some novels say very little yet say it well. This trite performance does neither.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times