About.com Rating



Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, September 2010

"A Rupert Groff might be perfect, mightn't it?" Peter Harris wonders. He's an art dealer in Manhattan who has the opportunity to represent Groff, an up and coming sculptor who crafts incendiary bronze urns inscribed with profanities from the likes of Valerie Solanas. Recently, one of Peter's clients decided she couldn't commit to a sculpture she bought for her garden and asks Peter for assistance in finding something to take its place.

Peter is conflicted about Groff and "his satires of wildly expensive, beautiful things that actually are, as it happens, wildly expensive, beautiful things," but one of his urns might be the perfect addition to his client's collection. He believes that the difficulty in separating Groff's structural skill with his statement as an artist "to be part of the joke," and seeing an opportunity for success he selects an urn for his client's garden.

While this business transaction is central to the plot of Michael Cunningham's excellent new novel By Nightfall, it is the surrounding drama - the things Peter doesn't see coming-that eat away at his professional and confident facade and really form this story.

Peter Harris and his wife Rebecca lead a perfectly content SoHo life of dinner parties and art exhibits. With a sudden visit from Rachel's much-younger brother Ethan (lovingly referred to as The Mistake, or Mizzy, by his family), Peter finds himself questioning not only his life as an art dealer but also his role as a husband and a father.

During Ethan's visit, Peter discovers he's shockingly infatuated with him, and wonders if it's "possible to be gay for just one man?"

Showcasing his masterful narrative command, Cunningham sneaks his readers deep into Peter Harris's mind as he struggles with his professional and sexual life. Cunningham shows us a depth of mind that could rival Joyce's Leopold Bloom; his narrative dances in and out of Peter's most private thoughts with astonishing grace. And, just as his readers are plunged beyond boundaries, many characters in By Nightfall find themselves in similar situations. In an early scene, Peter is resting alone in his room, listening to Ethan through the walls:

"Plus it's…what?…amazing, okay, in a fucked-up way, but still, it's amazing to slip into someone else's privacy like this. A few feet away is that rarest of entities-another being who believes himself to be alone. I mean yes, okay, we are probably not, when alone, profoundly or maybe even noticeably different, but how can you know that, really, about anyone, save yourself? Isn't this part of what you keep looking for in art-rescue from solitude and subjectivity; the sense of company in history and the greater world; the human mystery simultaneously illuminated and deepened..."

By Nightfall achieves that illumination that Peter looks for in art. It is a deeply private book, and one that manages to successfully philosophize while maintaining a stunning level of literary craftsmanship.

The only difficulty with By Nightfall is that it requires some knowledge of Peter's art world (as well as Cunningham's literary world) to get fully embedded into the book's drama. In dealing with the art elite, Peter name-drops artists in a way that will have readers yearning for illustrated footnotes. Cunningham, too, doesn't shy from his literary allusions. Whether it's a mention of Buck Mulligan or a chapter called "Nighttown", what does this do for readers who have yet to make it through Ulysses? Yet, with a wink, it almost feels as if By Nightfall is Cunningham's answer to the Rupert Groff urn: a book meant for his characters to read.



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.