By Nightfall

I'm a Michael Cunningham fan girl. It's impossible for me to be unbiased about anything Michael Cunningham writes. I have a sneaking suspicion that I have some amount of cognitive dissonance about By Nightfall - a book that I've wanted for over a year; that I picked up and lingered over every time I was in a bookstore; that I scoured every used bookstore for; that I finally paid full price in a physical bookstore for a new copy because I wanted it that badly (paperback; I haven't lost my mind); that I derailed a vacation for in order to see Cunningham speak about at the national book fair. So, I'm a little obsessed. And I have a suspicion that I read the book that I wanted to read, rather than the book Cunningham wrote.

I loved the introspective pieces of this book. The interstitial portions where characters ordered coffee and went on train rides were Cunningham at his best - he describes the mundanity of the human condition in a way that is both honest and profound and is completely unparalleled.

I loved the concepts in this book - that we, as humans, are in love with beauty, in love with art, in love with the profound and constantly disappointed in the inability of reality to produce concrete things that live up to the expectations in our imaginations. That we cultivate the relationships that exist in our life for their symbolism, and for their reflection on ourselves and for the concepts that they engender moreso than for the actually people in them. That the people we are when we are honestly alone – mentally, physically alone – is not ever the person that we can be to others.

I did not love the actual plot of this book. I was bored, rather than enthralled by Mizzy. I felt that at times, the symbolism was too on the nose (seriously, a character named “The Mistake”) and other times the mundanity was, well, mundane. Perhaps those feelings are apropos, given the context – Cunningham is one of the artists he describes, striving to find beauty, to unsettle, to provoke and coming up just a little short.