Cunningham

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.

Today is definitely cheating, because A Wild Swan and other tales (2015) is, as the full title suggests, not a novella. It’s very definitely a collection of short stories, but it does come in at around 130 pages, so at least that bit fits the bill.

I’ve reviewed a lot of Cunningham books here, and he is definitely one of my favourite living writers. As far as I know, this is his only book of short stories – and they are all twists on fairy tales. Often they take the well-known story and see it from another point of view. What is the backstory for the witch in Hansel and Gretel? Was there a good reason that the Prince had been cursed in Beauty and the Beast? Did the Giant really deserve to have everything stolen by Jack, or to be killed?

It’s a mercy of sorts. What, after all, did the giant have left, with his gold and his hen and his harp all gone?

The book has wonderful illustrations by Yuko Shimizu – fanciful, surreal, exuberant, a little dark. You can see some of them on Shimizu’s website.

Cunningham is so good at delving below the surface of the mundane that it feels quite odd to have his take on the fantastical. There is definitely a little of his dry reflections, such as this bit from a take on Rumpelstiltskin:

He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he’s had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in commemoration of nothing in particular beyond the celebration of the king himself.

And…

If the girl pulls it off one more time, the king has announced he’ll marry her, make her his queen.

That’s the reward? Marriage to a man who’d have had you decapitated if you’d failed to produce not just one but three miracles?

I did find A Wild Swan enjoyable and quirky. Maybe my only reservation is that, creative as it was, this is nothing new. People have been reworking fairy tales for generations, and it no longer feels very fresh to rewrite them from the antagonist’s perspective. If Cunningham had been the first to do anything like this then it would have been amazing. As it is, the book felt a little unnecessary.

I often find myself thinking of a line from Ann Thwaite’s biography of A.A. Milne, about his long poem about faith and philosophy The Norman Church: ”it was the sort of book which publishers accept ‘only out of deference to a writer who has supplied them through many years with better, more marketable books in other fields’.” I think about it for all sorts of books, and this was one of them. A new author would have a hard time justifying this book, but maybe his publishers thought Cunningham deserved to write what he fancied – and his name on the cover would sell plenty of copies.

So, I did enjoy this, in the same way I enjoy anything a little predictable and unchallenging. But did it need to be written?

By the way, I’ll be taking the day off a-novella-a-day tomorrow – because it’s my birthday, and I’ll be spending it with my bro. Back, maybe even with a proper novella, on the 8th!

If you click that ‘Cunningham’ tag above, you’ll see how much I love his writing. He is one of my favourite living writers, and I am getting unsettlingly close to having read everything he has published so far – one of the ones I hadn’t raced towards is 2005’s Specimen Days, and the reason is that it takes me very out of my comfort zones.

It’s a novel of three periods – much like Cunningham’s best-known book, The Hours, though in Specimen Days the periods do not interweave. Rather, there are about a hundred pages devoted to each – New York in the nineteenth-century, in a contemporary world still rocked by 9/11, and in a sci-fi future that I don’t remember the exact dates of. In each period are Simon, Catherine, and Lucas (or close variations on those names). They have different relationships in each section and, indeed, only two of them are alive in the first and second sections. It’s an intriguing and inventive premise – but did it work?

In the first period, Lucas is a young teenager starting work at a metalworks – taking over from his brother, Simon, who was killed in an accident with one of the machines. He has to go to earn money for his parents, but also wants to give some of it to Catherine – the woman who was going to marry Simon, and with whom Lucas has an uncertain relationship. Lucas is devoted; Catherine is a little unnerved, affectionate, troubled. It doesn’t help that Lucas can only communicate in Walt Whitman quotes, most of the time.

Walt Whitman is one of the most prominent connections between the sections. He actually appears as a character, briefly, in the first section – but, in each, there is a character who speaks chiefly in quotes from his poetry. In the first it is Lucas; in the second it is a child phoning in warnings about bombings (more on that soon); in the third it’s a robot. I was expecting more links and overlaps between the sections, but Cunningham doesn’t play overly with this conceit – so it’s Whitman’s words that form the threads between the worlds. Which would probably mean more to someone who had read some Whitman, which I have never done… I believe Leaves of Grass is still a text most high schoolers study in America, but Whitman is much less read here in the UK and I suspect I lost some of the significance that was intended.

Anyway, back to the 19th century. Historical fiction is a tricky genre for me, but I loved how Cunningham took us into Lucas’s world – with an accurate range of expression from an uneducated teenager in the midst of shocking grief. His job in the factory is simply putting metal plates into a machine to be stamped, and Cunningham manages to convey the almost dehumanising monotony of this in, paradoxically, a way that is captivating to read.

He began to see that the days at the works were so long, so entirely composed of the one act, performed over and over and over again, that they made of themselves a world within the world, and that those who lived in that world, all the men of the works, lived primarily there and paid brief visits to the other world, where they ate and rested and made ready to return again. The men of the works had relinquished their citizenship; they had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry. Their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works.

Man, Cunningham is good.

My favourite of the three sections, unsurprisingly, was the central, contemporary section. Catherine is now Cat, who works as the receiver of calls to the police that might pose plausible threats. Most of the calls she gets are from mentally unwell people who pose no real threat – who think their TV is spying on them, or that they are psychic, and so forth.

If the caller suggests that somebody is making them do something, then she has to ‘red tag’ the call, and elevate it to a different team – because if somebody else is instructing them, whether that person is real or not, then the threat becomes much more credible. In the call she receives from a young boy, she doesn’t red-tag when he says ‘I wasn’t supposed to call’.

It may or may not have made a difference – but not long afterwards, a politician is murdered when a boy hugs him and detonates a bomb. They spend some time trying to work out a connection, but it may be more unsettling: random attacks. Then Cat begins to get mysterious phonecalls from another boy who claims to be ‘in the family’ with the first caller.

In this period, Simon is Cat’s rich, obnoxious boyfriend. I shan’t spoil who Lucas is, but it’s a great twist. Cunningham is so good at the dynamics among a group of people, and I was totally absorbed in this contemporary world. He doesn’t need high stakes to make a narrative compelling, but they added something a little unusual here – and the final words of this section will stay with me for a long time.

And then the third section… Reader, I tried. I really did. But I simply have a brain block when it comes to a world of robots and invading aliens and whatnot. I never really knew what was going on, who was human and who was programmed or what the aliens were up to, and I ended up skim-reading it. I don’t really have anything to say, except I’m sure the problem was with me rather than Cunningham.

So it was definitely a curate’s egg for me. I will try anything Cunningham writes, but even a prose stylist as beguilingly good as him couldn’t get me past my own prejudices – or, rather, my own stumbling blocks. If you share mine, then I still recommend you read the first two thirds of this novel. And if you don’t share mine, then you’ll doubtless find a lot to love right to the final page.

Cunningham hasn’t published a novel for seven years, so I feel like one MUST be around the corner somewhere. His most recent is the brilliant The Snow Queen, and I would love him to do another like that, using a smaller conceit and keeping things in the real, contemporary world. And hopefully soon?

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?

One of the most important things about a holiday, I’m sure we can all agree, is choosing which books to bring. If I’m going on holiday by car, I bring wildly too many – because then I can have some choices while I’m away. I took eleven books for my recent week away, and the eleventh of those, thrown into the suitcase at the last minute, was The Snow Queen (2014) by Michael Cunningham. And thank goodness I did, because it ended up being exactly what I wanted to read first – and it’s absolutely brilliant.

We start just before the 2004 US General Election, where various characters are sure that George W. Bush won’t get re-elected because he is ‘the worst President in US history’. Wry laugh. Barrett Meeks has just broken up with his rather-younger boyfriend, who told him by text that they had both seen this coming – Barrett had not – when he sees something extraordinary in the New York sky:

The miniature groundscape at his feet struck him, rather suddenly, as too wintery and prosaic to bear. He lifted his heavy head and looked up.

There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star-high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering above the treetops. It may or may not have been slowly unfurling, densest at its centre, trailing off at its edges into lacy spurs and spirals.

Barrett thought that it must be a freakish southerly appearance of the aurora borealis, not exactly a common sight over Central Park, but as he stood – a pedestrian in coat and scarf, saddened and disappointed but still regular as regular, standing on a stretch of lamp-lit ice – as he looked up at the light, as he thought it was probably all over the news – as he wondered whether to stand where he was, privately surprised, or go running after someone else for corroboration – there were other people, the dark cutouts of them, right there, arrayed across the Great Lawn…

In his uncertainty, his immobility, standing solid in Timberlands, it came to him. He believed – he knew – that as surely as he was looking up at the light, the light was looking back down at him…

This moment of inexplicable encounter happens early in the novel, but it is quite possible to imagine the novel existing without it. Its principle impact is to make Barrett look more closely at life, and try to work out how he was the only person to see this light – and what it could mean, and why he was chosen to see it. But, around him, the novel’s other characters continue their complex, anxious, vibrant, and ordinary lives. Few authors show the complexity of the ordinary, and the banality of the extraordinary, as well as Cunningham does.

For instance, Barrett;s sister-in-law Beth is seriously ill with cancer. Her possible death laces every word spoken in the house, where Barrett moves ‘temporarily’ to recover from his break-up. But, in the midst of this, Barrett’s brother Tyler is preoccupied with trying to write a song for his upcoming wedding to Beth. He is a singer-songwriter who has always been the talented one – but possibly not talented enough to ‘make it’, after years of trying, or to avoid falling into cliche when he tries to express himself in song to Beth.

Various other friends form part of the core cast, and we go between the minds of all of them – mostly Barrett and Tyler, but Cunningham elegantly takes the third-person narrative into different people’s perspectives, often for fleeting moments, while maintaining a cohesion and fluidity to the novel. He is so good at the moments that synecdochically represent whole lives. And he is equally good at showing, through narrative and dialogue, the precise degree of love and trust between two characters. Barrett and Tyler are closer than any two brothers I’ve seen in fiction, and Cunningham enables the reader to feel this almost viscerally.

I was a bit worried when I saw, in the blurb, that Barrett would start going to church. Christianity is seldom written about well by people who aren’t Christians. But Cunningham resists a dramatic conversion or a fall from faith – rather, it is one of the ways that Barrett’s life opens up, without ever developing beyond a sense of cautious wonder. The mysterious light sends him on a new path, even if it doesn’t reveal a new destination.

Mostly, I just love reading Cunningham’s prose. There is something about the way he forms communities of characters, and something in the elegant simplicity of his writing, that makes reading one of his novels feel like having  cold, refreshing water pouring through your hands on a hot day. The Hours remains my favourite of the four or five I’ve read, but this is a close competitor. I think there’s a danger that his novels are underrated because they give such an effect of simplicity – of things happening to ordinary people, and then the novel concluding. But to do that well, and even with a sense almost of transcendence, is surely one of the highest possible achievements of the novel.

I read The Hours back in about 2003 and completely loved it – and loved it again when I re-read it maybe ten years later. I’ve read a couple of other Cunningham books (one fiction, one non-fiction) since then, but there are a few others waiting on my shelves, and I’m still trying to build up what I think of him as an author. Was The Hours an amazing aberration, or do I love him? To be honest, By Nightfall (2010) hasn’t completely cleared up that question.

The novel is from the perspective of an art dealer, Peter Harris. It’s not in the first person, but it is thoughts and personality which infuse the narrative – occasionally (as we’ll see) making it unclear whether the opinions are the character’s or the narrator’s. Peter’s career is going well, though he is constantly trying to square commercialism with his own appreciation for art. Is it acceptable to take on artists he doesn’t like, in order to make more money? He’s saddened by the way his daughter is distancing herself from him, having dropped out of college at least temporarily. And he’s feeling a bit static in his marriage to Rebecca, an editor.

It is a character study. And it is one which takes place surrounded by privilege. Peter is well-off, lives on the ‘right’ side of town, and is the sort of person who refers to his furniture by the name of the designer. This privilege is perhaps most pointed when he has to meet with somebody marginally less well off (asterisks my own):

Bette is already seated when he arrives. Peter follows the hostess through the dark red faux Victoriana of JoJo. When Bette sees Peter she offers a nod and an ironic smile (Bette, a serious person, would wave only if she were drowning). The smile is ironic, Peter suspects, because, well, here they are, at her behest, and sure, the food is good but then there’s the fringe and the little bandy-legged tables. It’s a stage set, it’s whimsical, for G*d’s sake; but Bette and her husband, Jack, have had their inherited six-room prewar on York and Eighty-fifth forever, he makes a professor’s salary and she makes mid-range art-dealer money and f*ck anybody who sneers at her for failing to live in downtown in a loft on Mercer Street in a neighborhood where the restaurants are cooler.

We are put into the mindset of somebody who thinks that fringe on tables is a major issue; we must look through the lens of somebody who probably doesn’t have anything from Ikea in his house. Perhaps that’s you too, and this wouldn’t be an obstacle to overcome, but I had to jump from my world of Argos flat-pack into this moneyed existence of self-indulgence. A jump that I can do with ease when it’s also back in time, but which somehow took some effort when it was only across an ocean.

I suppose the bigger obstacle, perhaps, is the name dropping. Peter is an art dealer, so of course we move into a world of artists – and I was constantly confronted by my own ignorance. This is my problem, not Cunningham’s, of course – though it didn’t necessarily help the world building when I didn’t know if the artists were real or fictional, or missed references to their styles which were important to describing a scene. Is it pretentious of Cunningham, or simply the accurate depiction of a type of man? Hard to say.

This aside, it is a beautifully and thoughtfully written novel. I’m not married and I don’t have children – I have no idea about Cunningham’s status on either – but I was firmly convinced by his portrayal of the anxieties of both. There is strain and misunderstanding and moments of connective joy – it feels like a poetic and true depiction. And an already complex scenario is rendered more complex by the arrival of Ethan, Rebecca’s younger brother, known as ‘Mizzy’ – short for Mistake – because he was born so many years after his three older sisters.

From the moment Ethan appears, he is intensely sexualised – even fetishised. Seeing half through Peter’s eyes and half through the objective narrator’s, it still isn’t much of a surprise when Peter starts to feel attracted to Ethan – even with Ethan’s fairly nuanced character, he has clearly been brought to the page to be an object of attraction.

What follows isn’t anything as simple as a love triangle, but it has the complexity and style that I’ve come to expect of Cunningham. The writing is the right side of poetic – so that it feels thoughtful and moving without being showy or obtrusive. Somewhat surprisingly, it is the structure that lets down By Nightfall a bit – I say surprisingly, because structure is what Cunningham used so brilliantly in The Hours. It feels too heavily weighted towards the end, where characters develop rapidly – and then, a little hurriedly, the novel comes to a close. It’s not often that I think a novel should be longer than it is, but I think By Nightfall could have benefited from another 50 pages or so.

Despite all this, it’s a very good novel – if it were the first I’d read by Cunningham, I think I’d be keen to explore more by him; as it’s the third novel I’ve read by him, I can’t help thinking that the other two were a bit better. But I’ll keep exploring the options on my shelves, and build up my understanding of who he is as a writer.