Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham

Fresh off reading The Snow Queen, I went to my Cs shelf to see what else was waiting by Michael Cunningham. Well done for stockpiling, past Simon – I had a couple to choose from, and opted for Flesh and Blood (1995). It’s 466 pages long, and if you’re familiar with my reading prejudices, you’ll know that I tend to be a bit scared of a long novel. But I decided to trust Cunningham on this, and I’m really glad I did. What a novel.

Flesh and Blood follows three generations of the same family, from 1935 to the far future, though the bulk of the novel takes place between the 1950s and 1990s. Constantine Stassos is a Greek-American who hopes his life with Mary will be the 2.4 children and white picket fence of the American Dream. He works in constructing homes, and is busy constructing his own too – trying to overlook his own short temper and Mary’s slightly other-worldly lack of contentedness.

They have the children. Sensitive Billy who can’t keep himself from being combative; beautiful Susan who oscillates between confidence and uncertainty; eccentric Zoe with her thirst for the new. As they grow up, and as we see one or two scenes in the family home each year, the cracks start to show. The reader is taken through the perspectives of almost every character, and we can piece together who they are from within their minds and from the vantage of all their family members. I thought moments like this – where Susan is watching her younger sister climb a tree – said what paragraphs of exposition wouldn’t achieve:

”She’ll fall,” Susan said, though she believed that Zoe was rising towards an accident, more endangered by the sky than by the earth.

And, later, they are at Billy’s university commencement ceremony – but he and his father have yet another falling out, and Billy disappears.

”We’re going,” Constantine told her. ”Come on.”

”That’s silly,” Susan said. ”If Billy’s being a brat, let him be a brat. There’s no reason for us to sit through commencement with a bunch of strangers.”

Mary couldn’t help marvelling at her elder daughter’s fearless shoulders, her staunch certainty, the crispness of her dress. She knew to call Billy a brat. She knew the word that would render his bad behaviour small and transitory. Mary couldn’t imagine why she so often felt irritated with Susan for no reason, and why Billy, the least respectful of her children, the most destructive, inspired in her only a dull ache that seemed to arise, somehow, from her own embarrassment.

The years keep going, and we get to the new generation – and to the new friends, lovers, and communities that the children move into. Billy is gay, as we have been able to tell from the outset – even if we hadn’t been prepped by the fact that it’s a Michael Cunningham novel. He doesn’t tell his parents, though they know. I shan’t spoil the paths of all the characters, but as the decades pass they include children, affairs, drug addiction, AIDS. There is a drowning that is the most beautifully written death scene I have ever read. People talk about ‘bad sex awards’ and how difficult it is to write good sex scenes, but I think writing good death scenes must be just as hard. For this one, Cunningham spends pages taking us through the waves and the thoughts, flowing in and out of metaphor. It is mesmeric and stunning and the greatest display of his extraordinary use of language in a novel that is full of extraordinary uses of language.

Some authors write a gripping plot that can make you race through a long book. Some write beautifully, pausing for striking imagery, and playing with how the right balance of sentences can reveal deep truths about their characters. Somehow, Cunningham is both. The novel is leisurely, allowing every moment to be saturated with meaning. But I also couldn’t put it down. I miss it so much. I don’t know how he does it, but Cunningham makes every cast of characters feel so vivid and real. There’s something in the way they speak to each other that would be easy to identify as Cunningham from a hundred paces.

I think The Snow Queen is still my favoured of the two Cunninghams I’ve just read, because there is something special in the way he condensed so much. But Flesh and Blood is extraordinary, and I’m sad at how few Cunninghams there are left on my shelf – just Specimen Days and a collection of short stories. But surely we must be due another novel before too long?