Gayest Ex Machina

It is not that I object categorically to novels about wealthy families with domestic troubles. Let's not throw out the Balzac with the bathwater. But Michael Cunningham is not Balzac.

By Nightfall, his new book, is typical. A vaguely dissatisfied, generally middle-aged, somewhat unhappily married, fairly prosperous, mostly unremarkable New York art dealer drifts into his forties, finds himself . . . well, drifting, and because this is a Michael Cunningham novel, he falls into a swoon for his wife's much younger brother, a homosexual set piece whose lovingly described body is lugged on and off the stage at various important scenes like a divan in a Donizetti, something pretty to fall against while warbling. This Mitchell Gold sofa is nicknamed "Mizzy," or The Mistake, an affectation and a telegraph so stunningly tone-deaf and totally out of place that it feels as if it were accidentally inserted from the novelization of a Logo original movie. In addition to evoking, for main-character Peter, an androgynous image of his wife as a younger woman, Mizzy recalls his dead gay brother, for whom he still harbors obliquely incestuous feelings. Now that would seem like it might lend the proceedings a little heat, at least, but everyone's lust is evoked lyrically and held at a slightly prim distance. Because of Cunningham's obvious Proustian ambitions, I was repeatedly reminded of Aciman's Call Me by Your Name, which is a book that actually has the cock and balls to give you a hard-on even as it manages to work in interesting bits of Heraclitus. (Aciman's next novel, set among prosperous New Yorkers, was on the contrary a failure; one wonders about the territory.)

By Nightfall moves between scenes of relentless interiority, by which I mean the boring personal taxonomy of an overanalyzed yuppie's mental architecture, and catty art-world commentary. The art stuff is occasionally funny, but depressingly phoned-in. Its hustlers and fakers, its earnest believers, and its ancillary clients and artists are all of type, and it reads like an impression of what the world of contemporary art is like by a person who has read a lot of people's impressions of what the world of contemporary art is like. Everyone's dilemmas are banal; nothing is at stake; no one is ever happy, and the closest it gets to sadness is a state of exhausting, agitated anxiety about nothing in particular. Peter wonders if it is possible to be gay for just one dude. (But given his feelings about his departed--from AIDS, of course--brother, isn't it more like, two dudes?) In life, probably not. In a Michael Cunningham novel, you betcha.