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Michael Cunningham is a genius. He's most well-known for The Hours, his Pulitzer prize winning book that is based on Mrs. Dalloway. I absolutely loved that book, as well as his other novel Flesh and Blood. And now I'm reading his A Home at the End of the World, and I just think that anyone who can write three books as consistently excellent as those three has got to be some kind of genius.
The thing that's most impressive about Cunningham is that all three books are so different. There are certain threads that connect them--he always writes about at least one gay male character, and he obviously loves New York, particularly the Village--but outside of certain details the books are all entirely different. Not only does each book deal with its own unique themes, they each have a distinct style. The Hours is an impressionistic book; lyrical and fluid, very detail-oriented and beautiful, taking place all in the course of a single day, it relates the stories of people who are only tenuously connected to each other. Flesh and Blood and A Home... are more plot-driven than The Hours; both span years in the lives of their characters and deal with people whose lives are very closely intertwined, but they do it in very different ways. Flesh and Blood is about a family, and has a distinctly aggressive tone with violent and disturbing undercurrents. A Home at the End of the World, however, deals with three close friends and takes a more thoughtful, sadder tone. At times it seems almost elegaic.
I'm also impressed by his ability to convincingly depict his female characters, something that was particularly noticeable in The Hours, but holds true through all of his books. He does a remarkable job of inhabiting their thoughts and emotions, something that not all male authors do well. In fact, Cunningham is so good at creating characters in general that this shouldn't be surprising. I am currently heart-wrenchingly in love with just about every character in A Home at the End of the World, so I guess he's pretty good at that stuff.
But I've spent all this time talking about his entire body of work, and I haven't yet gotten a chance to list everything that I love about the book that I'm currently reading! It just reached out and grabbed me from the first page. I was instantly and completely absorbed into the world of the novel. It's been a long time since I have read a book that has affected me as deeply as this book is affecting me now. I wish I could better describe exactly what the effect is, but I can't. It's almost a physical feeling. The book is just overpowering.
The thing that's most impressive about Cunningham is that all three books are so different. There are certain threads that connect them--he always writes about at least one gay male character, and he obviously loves New York, particularly the Village--but outside of certain details the books are all entirely different. Not only does each book deal with its own unique themes, they each have a distinct style. The Hours is an impressionistic book; lyrical and fluid, very detail-oriented and beautiful, taking place all in the course of a single day, it relates the stories of people who are only tenuously connected to each other. Flesh and Blood and A Home... are more plot-driven than The Hours; both span years in the lives of their characters and deal with people whose lives are very closely intertwined, but they do it in very different ways. Flesh and Blood is about a family, and has a distinctly aggressive tone with violent and disturbing undercurrents. A Home at the End of the World, however, deals with three close friends and takes a more thoughtful, sadder tone. At times it seems almost elegaic.
I'm also impressed by his ability to convincingly depict his female characters, something that was particularly noticeable in The Hours, but holds true through all of his books. He does a remarkable job of inhabiting their thoughts and emotions, something that not all male authors do well. In fact, Cunningham is so good at creating characters in general that this shouldn't be surprising. I am currently heart-wrenchingly in love with just about every character in A Home at the End of the World, so I guess he's pretty good at that stuff.
But I've spent all this time talking about his entire body of work, and I haven't yet gotten a chance to list everything that I love about the book that I'm currently reading! It just reached out and grabbed me from the first page. I was instantly and completely absorbed into the world of the novel. It's been a long time since I have read a book that has affected me as deeply as this book is affecting me now. I wish I could better describe exactly what the effect is, but I can't. It's almost a physical feeling. The book is just overpowering.
