two phrases I could do without, and Michael Cunningham

Two phrases have the insta-charm of nudging me into a dark corner:

The first: Can I pick your brain?

The second: Beth, the Prolific Author

The first always sounds like it will hurt. My hair will be shaved, my skin will be onioned (I mean peeled), my skull will be shattered (crash), and then my brain will be picked. Ouch. I want to help. I am glad to recommend an excellent book or think something through or suggest a possibility. I can answer (some) questions. (I have no answers for the really hard questions.) But I don't want my brain to be picked. I really don't.

The second I receive (oh, sensitive me) as a sleight. "Prolific" is a substitute word. When someone says "prolific" someone is most likely also not saying more meaningful words, like: "thoughtful," "searching," or even "good." Prolific, though, is how I'm most often introduced. I look at my writing life. I see struggle, hope, frustration, some elation, very little time, books that matter to me, a voice that carries me, quiet that sustains me, quiet that I search for in between the jobs I must do so that the bills will get paid (most of which I have nothing to do with the writing of books), and, thus far at least, no true commercial success. I look at my writing life and I see books that, every single one, came from a deep place and not from a machine, from a hope to capture some essence of the world I love, from a belief that I haven't conquered the whole thing yet, haven't figured it all out, never will.

I was thinking about this as I read Kevin Nance's interview with Michael Cunningham in today's issue of the Chicago Tribune Printers Row. Here's the excerpt that I stopped to jot down. I like what Cunningham says:

On the one hand, writers should write about the biggest possible world, and that takes more than one novel. But I'd be a little suspicious of a writer whose vision and sensibility and quality of insight were unrecognizable from one novel to another. I would wonder what that writer really (cares) about.

If you look at writers far greater than I, from Chekhov through Faulkner, the stories and the books differ from one to another, but there's a Chekhovian sensibility. There's a Faulknerian sensibility. You hope to be able to tune in to a lot of characters, but there's a limit to how chameleonlike you wan to be.

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By Nightfall/Michael Cunningham: Reflections

If I have at times been mildly bewildered by some of the plot points in Michael Cunningham's new novel, By Nightfall, I have never been less than enthralled by the sentences this artist makes, by the craftsmanship of this intimately close-over-the-shoulder rendering of one Peter Harris, aesthete in mid-life crisis. 

The story can be easily summarized—Peter and his wife, Rebecca, are comfortably married but perhaps privately disillusioned when Rebecca's much younger brother arrives, a beautiful bi-sexual with a wayward touch who is using drugs again.  Peter finds the brother's presence distracting, even deconstructing.  He is reminded, increasingly, of his own brother, now dead "of a virus." He questions nearly everything about him—his career as an art dealer, his history as a father, his reasons for marrying Rebecca—while maintaining, throughout most of the book, the sheen of business-as-usual.

We are given, through Cunningham, Peter's history, and at times I found it difficult to bridge connections between Peter the child, Peter the adolescent, and Peter the middle aged.  My disorientation was utterly beside the point.  For there are so many pleasures in this book, so many passages I envied for their ease and suggestible insights.  Let me share just two with you here:

Maybe it's not, in the end, the virtues of others that so wrenches our hearts as it is the sense of almost unbearably poignant recognition when we see them at their most base, in their sorrow and gluttony and foolishness.  You need the virtues, too—some sort of virtues—but we don't care about Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina or Raskolnikov because they're good.  We care about them because they're not admirable, because they're us, and because great writers have forgiven them for it. 

Or how about this Gatsby-esque moment, which we find early on in the book:

They are crossing Central Park along Seventy-ninth Street, one of hte finest of all nocturnal taxi rides, the park sunk in its green-black dream of itself, its little green-gold lights marking circles of grass and pavement at their bases.  There are, of course, desperate people out there, some of them refugees, some of them criminals; we do as well as we can with these impossible contradictions, these endless snarls of loveliness and murder.

When I grow up, I want to write at least one sentence like at least one of those.

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You Are My Only: There, breathing

Sometimes the only way to finish writing a book is to read a book you haven't written, and this weekend I distanced myself from You Are My Only by reading By Nightfall, the new Michael Cunningham novel.  Between reading, I went off to Skippack.  I took a walk.  I took my big camera out and found my way to the back side of an old cottage at the Willows, where I discovered this tank, its clock forever corroded by time.

It was, all of it, a restoration.  I returned to my own novel in the middle of last night and read it through once more, adding, subtracting, but not by much. 

It is there.  It is whole now.  I can breathe.

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A novel in which everything is perfect is waxwork

I find this in the NYTBR Jeanette Winterson review of By Nightfall, the new Michael Cunningham novel. 

I find it, and I celebrate it:

Good novels are novels that provoke us to argue with the writer, not just novels that make us feel magically, mysteriously at home.  A novel in which everything is perfect is a waxwork.  A novel that is alive is never perfect.

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