"By Nightfall"

“By Nightfall” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), by Michael Cunningham (best known as the author of “The Hours”), is a strange, intriguing, and at times faintly creepy novel. It is set in New York City’s artsy Soho, and features a very odd trio of main characters. Peter owns an art gallery, loves his wife, and ponders the place of beauty in his life. His wife Rebecca edits a literary journal. Ethan, Rebecca’s much younger brother, breathtakingly beautiful but lacking direction, with a history of serious drug-taking, comes to stay with Peter and Rebecca for a while. Peter finds himself drawn to Ethan’s beauty and his resemblance to Rebecca when she was younger; this attraction, and Ethan’s casual duplicity and self-protection, combine to cause a major upheaval in the lives and marriage of Peter and Rebecca. Interwoven with this story are Peter’s meditations on art, beauty, love, aging, romance, and more. Cunningham captures the contradictory desires that often appear at mid-life: on the one hand, the enjoyment of a comfortable, happy, reasonably fulfilling life, and on the other hand, the yearning for something “big” and dramatic – a passionate romance, a huge, brave yet somehow effortless change in one’s life – to happen before it is too late. He understands the mid-life fear of having allowed life to pass one by, the fear of having “settled.” These are all serious issues, obviously, but Peter's sudden preoccupations with them seem rather superficial and even melodramatic. “By Nightfall” certainly keeps the reader’s attention, but there is something a little too facile, a little too self-indulgent in the character of Peter that put this particular reader off a bit.