The Snow Queen – named after the fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen – is not set in our capital, but in Bushwick, a rather dingy neighbourhood of Brooklyn. It is the home of the two protagonists, Tyler and Barrett Meeks, both highly educated and in middle age. Both are also, albeit for different reasons, restless and unsatisfied. Barrett, the younger of the two and gay, spends the first part of the novel getting over his latest romantic rejection (via SMS!). One evening, he is wandering dejected through a snowy Central Park, and he thinks he sees a vision: “There it was. A pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil, star-high, no, lower than the stars, but high, higher than a spaceship hovering above the treetops.”
The image continues to haunt him, and causes a kind of metaphysical epiphany in Barrett, which to his surprise, he does not want to share with his older brother. Tyler, 43, is a would-be musician whose wife Beth is suffering from cancer. He attempts to soften the gnawing anxiety of his frustrated artistic ambitions with the occasional line of coke, but he’s gradually slipping into addiction. The brothers have a strong bond, and along with Beth they live in an intimate “ménage à trois”. Until, after an unexpected and brief revival, Beth dies anyway...
Just like in his previous novels, such as The Hours (1998) or the more recent By Nightfall (2010), Cunningham again compassionately observes people who are struggling with a certain Sehnsucht, the inescapable feeling that life should be more, greater than the everyday rut. Their doubts and desires, complex emotions and frustrations are the raw materials from which he hones his elegant, musical prose. What is it about these searching souls consumed by anxiety that fascinates Cunningham so much that they recurrently populate his melancholy stories? “Well, many people want more than life seems to be offering them,” he says. “Not everyone, of course – there is nothing that is true of all people. But some of the ones that interest me most are people who seek and question; who imagine ‘more’, not – of course – in the sense of a bigger house or better TV shows or anything like that, but a closer connection to others, to the Earth, to their feeling of purpose on the Earth... I’m not particularly religious, but you could say that most religions stem from a sense of restlessness and dissatisfaction: the conviction, or at least the hope that human life is more than working and eating and going to the movies on Saturday night; that it has a deeper purpose. It’s hard to imagine a novel about people who are just...doing fine. Who are pleased with what they have and just sort of totter along, all placid and content. Would you want to read a novel about people like that?”
Tyler wants to compose the ultimate love song but is encumbered by his creative ambitions, and constantly feels inadequate. Is writing a conflictual process for you too? Is it never good enough?
Michael Cunningham: That’s entirely right, and frankly, I would not trust a writer who feels fully satisfied with his or her work. One always had a greater novel in mind than the novel one was able to write. One had in mind a story so vast and deep, so true and compassionate and insightful, so funny and tragic and exciting… There isn’t language for that novel. The experience of living isn’t quite translatable into words. And so the novels, the words, always feel like approximations. You’ve done the best you can, and you may have done fairly well, but still, there’s always a bigger story you wanted to tell, a story that can’t really be told at all – at least, not in words.
After his so-called vision, Barrett often goes to sit in an empty church, and by the end of the novel, he seems to have found a certain inner peace. What is your attitude to spirituality? Has it become relevant again?
Cunningham: I do believe in some form of spirituality, in the broadest sense – an overriding purpose, the conviction that love matters. You could say it’s a spiritual act to help a stranger get out of a burning car, in that there’s no practical reason for you to do it, you’re just putting yourself in danger, and this person means nothing to you. And yet, we routinely risk our own safety on behalf of people we don’t know, and will never see again. That strikes me as a spiritual system, right there. As to a “new” spiritual system, what we probably need is an improved version of the existing one; a system in which we not only help that stranger out of that hypothetical car but do what we can to stop countries from bombing other countries, intervene for sick people receiving no care, ameliorate needless human suffering wherever and whenever we see it. Actual “religion,” in the organised sense, makes me nervous. I worry sometimes that religious fanaticism, along with consumerism and the corporations that serve it, will destroy the world, maybe sooner rather than later.
The Snow Queen was partly written in Brussels. What are the memories you cherish from that period?
Cunningham: The month I spent in Brussels thanks to the generosity of Passa Porta was among the most productive of my entire life. I had just ended a long relationship and my home in New York suddenly felt haunted. Soon after the separation, by some small miracle, I was able to spend an entire month in a place that was unfamiliar, and therefore unhaunted. I could think and feel so much more clearly here. It was almost literally a kind of rescue.
MEET THE AUTHOR: MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM • 9/6, 20.00, €5/7, EN, Passa Porta, rue Antoine Dansaertstraat 46, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-226.04.54, www.passaporta.be
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