By Nightfall

Michael Cunningham echoed the genius of Virginia Woolf in The Hours and Walt Whitman in Specimen Days, but in By Nightfall, his middle-aged protagonist Peter Harris finds himself waiting for an aesthetic genius on the order of Thomas Mann or Édouard Manet to arrive in his own life. A New York art dealer with a slew of better-than-average non-geniuses on his hands, Peter acknowledges and laments that occurrences of the extraordinary are rare. Yet when his competent, handsome wife's methed-out younger brother Mizzy arrives in the city, Peter is confronted suddenly with dangerous, startling beauty. And as might be expected of a guy in a midlife existential crisis, he makes mistakes. Cunningham gracefully weaves Peter's psychological state throughout the narrative, creating a sense of unmediated consciousness. Sometimes, unfortunately, Cunningham's close third-person comes at the expense of developing other characters. We know every instance (and there are many) that Peter ponders the proper word to define his wife's nose, but we have little sense of who she is. We know Mizzy is a real hunk, but we have no idea why it's important for him to appear sober to his sister. Still, By Nightfall provides the intimate portrayal of inner life that makes Cunningham one of American fiction's best portraitists of the individual.