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July 18, 2008
A REVIEW OF FLESH AND BLOOD BY MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Flesh And Blood by Michael Cunningham
My review
FLESH AND BLOOD is Cunningham's worst book, I think (he wrote it before THE HOURS made him a literary superstar), and yet it still resonates with me, and it may possibly be his most beautifully written. There are entire paragraphs I can excerpt that are worthy of being published as a poem. For instance, this:
"Zoe sipped her coffee, looked out the steamed window at Waverly place. An obese man walked a gleeful-looking yellow dog he had dressed in a white blouse and a plaid skirt. There was a new world with no rules and there was an old world with too many. She didn't know to live in either place" (155).
What makes him my favorite author is the way he takes something epic and turns into a series of intimate moments, like we're reading a scene that already has a history that later becomes explained or must be inferred from his (always) dynamic characters. Cunningham is a modern (or post-modern, whatever) writer in the sense that he tends to scoff the fact of the epic, the tragic, and the objective meaning at the same time as he admires he characters in their bold searches for just those things. Zoe, the youngest and most tragic of the bunch, never figures out how to live in her own skin, and her the degradation of that flesh becomes a central metaphor.
In this case, the Stassos family is notable for their lack of commonalities. Taking that Tolstoy passage about how every family is miserable in a different way (or something like that), each member of the Stassos shares the same blood (a fierceness and individuality that refuses to conform even when, technically, it seems to be moving toward some kind of numbing acceptance) but bears it under different flesh (in Cunningham's brilliant and hardly reconfigurable use of metaphor, I believe that such "flesh" is always choice, and often a choice of sexuality).
SPECIMEN DAYS, FLESH AND BLOOD, and A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD all share the common theme of makeshift families. A family, for Cunningham, is either something completely organic or impossible to avoid. A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD deals with those who have resisted or rejected families, and the tolls those take, and their attempts to establish that community in a way that avoids the mistakes of their "real family."
The ending of FLESH AND BLOOD, its final powerful moment, is vivid, and carries with it a sense of Freudian reenactment. This is, of course, my readerly subjection to the text, but I do think Cunningham is punishing not only victimizers, but also the reader who has been forced to indulge in the victimizations. If the enemy of Cunningham is convention, the unattainable ideal is something like the weird Alien love story that closes SPECIMEN DAYS. Ever an apologist for gay culture, Cunningham pushes to accept what is primal, rather than what previously dog-eared for happiness. The result is a montage of events, places, people, personal choices, and consequences, and it is as beautiful to read as it is tough to endure. And Cunningham has always been, at heart, a naturalist, a determinist who believes that nature in some form of disease is going to writhe us of what makes us uniquely us. And yet he's also an optimist, and he loves families, and strong women, and children, and literature.
Which is why, I suppose, he is my favorite writer.
View all my reviews.
| By Andytown | 6:10 PM
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