![]() ![]() One of the many pleasures of Cunningham’s books is the honest-and intimate-way he writes about the burdens of love. Meanwhile, back in his soon-to-be-gentrified Bushwick apartment, Barrett’s brother Tyler, a flailing musician with a secret cocaine problem, is plagued by his fiancée Beth’s late-stage cancer and obsessed with writing a perfect wedding song for her before she dies-a song that “won’t be all treacle and devotion, without (of course) being devoid of treacle and devotion.” Though for most of his life Barrett has been devoutly secular, “as only an ex-Catholic can be,” he can’t deny what he witnesses-or the power the vision brings to bear on his life. Barrett Meeks, a 38-year-old Brooklynite who has, yet again, been dumped-this time via text message-is trudging through Central Park one morning when he looks up in the sky and sees “a pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil” over the treetops. ![]() The war itself doesn’t change any of these people’s lives instead, they change in parallel to outside circumstances. But Cunningham’s new novel takes a slyly different approach: Rather than attempting to demonstrate how another Bush term, or an Obama win, would affect his characters, he imbues their lives with a narrative trajectory that directly mirrors America’s own story during that turbulent four-year span: an arc of despair, followed by cautious hope, and then back again. ![]() In all of these books, politics writ large directly touch individual lives. ![]()
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