Peter Harris returns home and hears the shower running. He sees the pink blur of his wife, Rebecca, behind the frosted glass shower door. He looks in. She’s facing away from him, and the shower seems to have taken away twenty years. Rebecca is young again. She turns, surprised, but it isn’t Rebecca; it’s Ethan, Rebecca’s younger brother. He says, “Hey†and is not the least uncomfortable for Peter to see him naked.
Peter is 44, a handsome and successful second-tier art dealer; Peter’s life is filled with the conflict of art vs. commerce ― the practice and ethics of which artists to represent, which artists to feature in his front gallery, which art to sell to which buyer. Peter pursues beauty ― both physical and artistic ― and youth, and he finds both desire and disillusion.
Peter’s wife, Rebecca, is the lovely editor of a small literary journal. Her 23-year-old brother Ethan is so much younger that he is known in the family as Mizzy ― the mistake. He’s a beautiful sexy improvident drifter who’s shameless and unreliable, a drug addict who comes to stay with them and plans to do “something in the arts.†Rebecca hopes Peter can guide Mizzy toward something respectable in the arts and away from drugs.
However, Peter’s in emotional turmoil as he tries to conceal his improper attraction to Mizzy. Peter has been straight his entire life, and he tries to explain his surprising attraction to Mizzy’s youth and vitality, to Mizzy’s reminding him of Rebecca, to unresolved feelings about his brother who died of AIDS, or to Mizzy as the embodiment of the beauty that he’s been looking for in art. When Peter overhears Mizzy on the phone buying drugs, he doesn’t let Rebecca know, because she might send Mizzy away.
By Nightfall is told in the third person through Peter’s point of view. The title may refer to Peter’s growing older and losing his sense of youth. Peter’s nocturnal wanderings also demonstrate his loneliness and sense of isolation.
Despite the gay sensibilities in By Nightfall, the only fleshed-out sex scene (so to speak) is a heterosexual one ― between Peter and Rebecca. The overtly homosexual action in the novel is limited to just two kisses, but Peter’s internal thoughts throughout the novel reflect his obsession with Mizzy.
This is Pulitzer-Prize winner Cunningham’s seventh novel. He won the Stonewall Literature Award in 1999 for The Hours and won a Stonewall honor book award in 1991 for A Home at the End of the World. Both books have been made into films.
Cunningham’s novels often cover great spans of time and space. By Nightfall covers only a few days in a small world, but that world embraces art, commerce, relationships, and marriage, and those days bring about an epiphany for Peter and Rebecca.
Highly recommended for all libraries.
Reviewed by, Larry Romans
Vanderbilt University Libraries
