The Snow Queen crawls at snail’s pace – and you wouldn’t want it any other way

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.

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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.