By Nightfall

This beautifully-written story of an art dealer's mid-life, mid-career, mid-marriage crisis is, as we have come to expect in Michael Cunningham's fiction, rich in allusions, but, except for the big urn protagonist Peter Harris sells to his favorite client, I don't recall any mention of John Keats. But I kept thinking of the poet's tragic paradox by Peter's impossible attempt to find, in the ineffable beauty of sculpture and of a dangerous lover, an experience of the infinite he well knows is at odds with the temporary pleasures and pains of real life. Along the way, although far shorter than Jonathan Franzen's recent blockbuster, By Nightfall similarly makes us wonder if freedom is all it's cracked up to be.

Michael Cunningham takes us into the mind of Peter Harris, an New York art dealer who muses over every little detail of his boring life. One wants to shout at the narrator, "Get on with it, already." However, it is not his fault, he's only reading the mind of a man who regales us with every little detail of every little incident in his life and believes that we care. The story has more asides than a Shakespearean play that add little to the plot and do not further the cause of story telling. There is no plot, only subplots, and in the end, nothing is resolved.

Loved " The Hours". Hated this. Overwritten annoying characters that I was hoping would get hit by a bus. Very dissappointing

Astonishing.
Cunningham does it again. His vision for the tiny heartbreaking meaningful details of like is just astonishing. Just like The Hours I am sure I will listen to this over and over.

Although I enjoyed listening I found the it to be anticlimactic and disappointing at the conclusion. Most of the book was suspenseful but the ending fell short.

There were times when this book threatened to blossom into greatness but then the threat would harmlessly pass, and we were back to clueless characters with limited self-awareness who pointedly refused to ask obvious questions. This is absolutely maddening. It's forgivable if two characters are in the heat of the moment, but when the author takes pains to have them think about it in advance and then have them discuss it numerous times and never bother to voice something that is very clear to the reader is simply frustrating. It keeps the book from ever advancing past the introductory and superficial issues into something a bit more profound. And yet this book seems to have pretensions of profundity. I could never figure out if Cunningham thought he was truly being profound or if he simply isn't aware that he's only scratching the surface. Just as I could never figure out if the New Yorkers in this book truly believed they were more sophisticated than the rest of us, or if they simply aren't aware that they are merely deformed examples of arrested development.