For all would-be novelists whose stumbling block is that they can’t resist describing every single sensation in depth — the smell of a bedroom, the sound of a door closing, the feel of a sofa, the experience of getting in and out of a bath — and who therefore find it hard to push a plot along, Michael
Cunningham’s new novel is a masterclass. The Pulitzer-prizewinning author of The Hours (in which three-quarters of a page is taken up with an unforgettable description of the armchair of an ill man) is a chronic over-describer. In this new novel about the lives and anxieties of two brothers in their forties, Tyler (straight) and Barrett (gay), the first hour of a weekday morning in a cramped flat in a dingy suburb in Brooklyn takes up over 90 pages, and you wouldn’t want it any other way.
Barrett’s emptying bath is so described:
The sloughed-off outermost layer of city grime and deceased epidermis are (he can’t help thinking this) some measure of his essence, his little greeds and vanities.
The flat has
an acoustic ceiling, the apartment’s most horrific aspect, pockmarked, dingily white squares made of god-knows-what. Tyler thinks of them as blocks of freeze-dried sorrow.
And so on. By the time the working day begins, 90 pages later, we have been treated to superb poetic meditations on the atmosphere of a snowy suburb, the joy of clandestine drug-taking, the deep silences of siblinghood, and the atmosphere of a flat in which someone is suffering from cancer.
Then, would-be novelists, you put a full stop at the end of a deep description of something small, and you start the next chapter two years later. Just write ‘November 2006’ and you’ve jumped forward without having to describe anything in between. After which, as Cunningham shows, you can spend another 60 pages describing the 47 minutes leading up to midnight. The scene here is the same dingy apartment, but now there’s a small party going on, and a DVD is playing of a crackling fire in a fireplace, and Beth, Tyler’s wife, the cancer-sufferer, is better. The next chapter starts (two years later) on the Staten Island Ferry, with the difficulty of opening a canister of something. A canister? Of course. This is chilling.
The Snow Queen has an odd (and some might find annoying) leitmotif of a wink in the sky, which Barrett sees at the very beginning of the novel, just after he’s been chucked by his latest boyfriend and which makes him think he’s been singled out and noticed by a higher power. I’m not quite sure what all this is about, but there’s definitely a whiff of spirituality in the urban air. Barrett, who ‘has, since the age of 15, been adamantly secular, in the way that only an ex-Catholic can be’, starts going to church. It’s all rather strange but you keep reading because the prose is sublime and you are in the hands of a wise and thoughtful author.
The prose is sometimes so sublime that it draws too much attention to the act of writing itself. I did keep imagining Cunningham gazing with satisfaction at his laptop screen in New York after a particularly juicy description. Take the following, for example: ‘The future, even if it reveals itself as improvement, smells of incipient snow, and the stodgy, steely scent of windswept railway platforms.’ But on the whole we should approve of this kind of unembarrassed poeticising, in which every sensation is deemed worthy of pause.
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