You won’t find much mention of Golden States (1984) by Michael Cunningham online – or even in the next novels that were published, which silently erased his debut novel. In an interesting and deep interview Cunningham gave around 2001, he said this about Golden States:
I never felt good about that book, because I wrote it too fast. Because I knew it wasn’t the best book I could write. I’ve always felt that literature and reading have so many enemies—and writers are the very least of the enemies of writing and reading. But I do sometimes find myself looking through the books in a bookstore and galleys people have sent me, thinking, you could have done better than this. You did not put your ass on the line. Here’s just another book taking up space in the universe, and this is part of what is making it hard to keep books alive in the world. They just stack up like cordwood. I’m so much more interested in some kind of grand ambitious failure than I am in someone’s modest little success that achieves its modest little aims. I felt that I had written a book like that, and I wasn’t happy about it. My publisher very generously allowed me to turn down a paperback offer and it has really gone away.
It’s an interesting take on a novel that I think is much better than Cunningham thinks it is. He doesn’t need to be ashamed of it at all.
Golden States is about David, a young boy living with his mother and sister Lizzie in California, and his experiences on the cusp of young adulthood. Parts of him are very childish – he constantly squabbles with his sister, and plays games (and then fall out) with his nearby best friend. Parts of him are beginning to develop more, so he is asking questions about his future, his older half-sister’s (Janet’s) long-term relationship, his place in the world. Recurring antagonisms continue alongside something new. Here is one conversation, but almost any in the first half of the book could be used as an example of the way Cunningham combines the frivolous and the undercurrent.
Janet and Lizzie glanced at one another. “What’s nine times seven?” Lizzie asked.
David put his fingers in his ears. “Don’t do that,” he said, and his voice sounded to him as if he was speaking from a cave. Janet said something, and he unstopped his ears. “What?” he asked her.
“My feet are cold,” Lizzie said.
“Then go inside. What did you say, Janet?”
“Let’s all go in,” Janet said.
“That’s not what you said.”
“Men,” Janet said to Lizzie in a lofty, lecturer’s tone, “always want the facts.”
“That’s not true,” David said.
Janet patted his knee. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get the lizard inside before she freezes to death.”
“Don’t call me that,” Lizzie said. She had begun hopping on one foot, and shivering.
“Go on,” David said. “I’m going to sit here a little longer.”
He hoped Janet would send Lizzie in alone, but she got up and slipped her arm around Lizzie’s skinny shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “See you inside.”
“See you,” David said.
Lizzie tucked her hand under Janet’s belt, glanced over her shoulder, smiled knowingly, and said, “Sixty-three.”
As with most Cunningham novels, the book is about interiority – but the sort of interiority that surfaces in conversations with anyone and everyone. People, particularly David, never quite express what it is that they are trying to convey, but keep determinedly trying. Cunningham’s talent is combining this philosophical search with everyday dialogue and the details of the mundane. A thwarted shoplifting or a sibling dispute speak to much larger matters – things that David cannot comprehend, so he feels frustrated and confused. Many of Cunningham’s characters feel frustrated and confused, but the older ones at least expect it. David has yet to learn the limits of understanding.
In the second half of the novel, the dynamic changes. Janet is back in San Francisco – and David decides he has to travel there, for reasons I won’t spoil. And off he goes, with little money and a lot of nervousness about the journey. From here, Golden States becomes something of a travel or quest narrative – the curious people he’ll meet along the way, including one character who I think would be written rather differently now. The blurb says he ‘guides [David] across the threshold of sexuality’, but David is a child and the scene is deeply uncomfortable, even if not at all graphic.
I found the second half of the novel very tense, but preferred the more relaxed dynamics of the first half. I think they play better into Cunningham’s strengths as a writer – which include writing little gems of insightful sentences, like ‘The day would not settle into itself; would not descend from its feeling of suspension, as if the real day was yet to begin.’ There is a poeticism to his writing that is threaded through everything, even when contrasted with quite austere dialogue, and that won’t be to everyone’s tastes. For me, Golden States shows all the promise of the psychologically fascinating novelist Cunningham would become – and, indeed, bears comparison with many of his later novels. If it isn’t his masterpiece, or even the runner up, Golden States is still a very able and intriguing book of which Cunningham should be proud.
How very curious Cunningham has such negative feelings about this novel. Probably not uncommon for writers, of course, whose intent for a work may not match their perception of the finished piece.
Yes, I think a few authors feel like that about their early work – sometimes justifiably! But this is a better book than some of his later ones, IMO.
yes, could well be that – he knows more about what the process was like, of course
Hm, this DOES sound better than his most recent ones, to me, too! I’ve never found a copy of this though haven’t I admit actually searched for it. Like Anne Tyler disowning her first four novels and Iris Murdoch her Irish one, interesting, but these things do never quite go away, do they!
Yes, sometimes authors are not the best judgers of their books…