By Nightfall - Michael Cunningham

Spring has sprung in eastern Australia - a time I love because of the relief it brings from winter dreariness but a time I hate because it brings on my annual bout of hay fever and allergies which seems to go on and on and on... I typically lack all energy and enthusiasm during this time - even blogging has been a real effort unfortunately - and going outside is a dangerous activity so I have been diving into my reading as a way of comfort and escape - and thankfully finding some great books in the process.

By Nightfall, the new book by Michael Cunningham , has been one of those finds. I first discovered Cunningham through his amazing book The Hours earlier this year so I feel very blessed to be able to read a new work of his so soon after falling in literary love.

By Nightfall tells the story of Peter Harris, a middle-aged art dealer living in New York with his wife, Rebecca. For all intense purposes Peter's life appears to be travelling along quite well as the story begins, he certainly isn't as huge a player in the art world as he might like to be but he is making a comfortable living and enjoying a fairly up market lifestyle. His relationship with Rebecca may be lacking some spark after the twenty odd years they have been together but they have a comfortableness about them that seems safe and pleasantly happy - if occasionally resigned.

The story of Peter and Rebecca's present day life is interwoven with stories and reflections of their childhood and family life - all told from the perspective and focus of Peter. Peter is clearly smitten with Rebecca's bohemian and slightly eccentric upbringing - as compared with his dull, ritualised suburban childhood and he admits at one point that in marrying Rebecca he was in turn taking on her family - an act he wasn't at all unhappy about.

It is Rebecca's younger brother, Ethan, who come along to play a larger part in Peter's story. Ethan (or Mizzy as he is known - short for "mistake" - alluding to the fact that he was conceived 20 years after the then youngest child of the family had been born) has just returned from a soul-searching trip to Japan after his latest attempt to join middle class society had failed. It seems that in line with his name, Mizzy is constantly making mistakes (according to others) in terms of his life choices and unlike his siblings he has become trapped in a world of drug abuse and addiction and we learn that it isn't really a world that he wants to escape from - despite the protestations of his sisters and Peter.

It is through Mizzy's story and his actions that Peter starts to see his own life choices and plans reflected - and it is then that things start to take a turn - for better or worse??

I can't say that I fell in love with By Nightfall in the same way that I did with The Hours - but then, that was a very special and rare thing and it shouldn't take anything away from Cunningham's latest book which is a fantastically told story.

The Hours - Michael Cunningham

Just when I thought a book would never come along to topple Mrs Dalloway off it's perch for me I find The Hours. I know it is probably sacrilegious to list an emulation of a Woolf classic as higher than the classic itself - but I did fall completely in love with Cunningham's writing, his version of the story and his amazing creative talent in bringing the stories and character's together.

Cunningham takes Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and creates a modern interpretation of the novel by telling the stories of three female characters; Clarissa who lives in 1990's New York is in the midst of planning for a party to take place at her apartment that night, Laura Brown a young housewife and mother suffocating in the existence of 1940's suburban Los Angeles and Virginia Woolf herself, also living in the suburbs ,as a tonic for her health, and who is in the process of writing Mrs Dalloway.

Each chapter of the book is told from the perspective of each character in her own voice - and the voices are clear and distinct and yet in many ways containing a similar essence. The women are separated by time and place and yet they share common dreams and pains - the desire to be free, to be loved for who they are and to make their own choices. Cunningham uses simple, every day tasks and events to illustrate the inner worlds of the characters. I thought some of the most effective and painful parts of the narrative were the scenes where Laura is going through the process of making a cake for her husband's Birthday party;

Still she had hoped to create something finer, something more significant, than what she's produced, even with its smooth surface and its centered message. She wants (she admits to herself) a dream of a cake manifested as an actual cake; a cake invested with an undeniable and profound sense of comfort, of bounty. She wants to have baked a cake that banishes sorrow, even if only for a little while. She wants to have produced something marvelous; something that would be marvelous even to those who do not love her.

She has failed. She wishes she didn't mind. Something, she thinks, is wrong with her.

I felt such connection with these characters, Laura in particular even though she is probably the one I have the least in common with in life (apart from her desire to just escape her life for a while and read her beloved book in bed!).

I was so sad when this book ended - partly because of the pain it had touched on in each of the characters but mostly because I just wanted to keep reading more about them. I am definitely glad that I waited to read The Hours until after I had read Mrs Dalloway - the book would stand alone perfectly but it has so much more meaning for being able to connect it to Woolf's writing. I will be reading this one again, and again and possibly even again.