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Telling the stories of brothers Tyler and Barrett, with interspersing brief moments from their lovers and mothers, Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen reunites its author with a familiar subject: the sublimity of the ordinary.
Barrett is a failed academic whose scholarly pursuits have dried up long before they should have begun to do so, while his romantic life is one mostly mediated by text messages and bottles of Pepsi. His brother fares no better, with dreams of a future career in music and an ever-growing drug habit. Tyler’s girlfriend, Beth, meanwhile is deteriorating before him, afflicted by a terminal cancer and existing like one of the many snowflakes that blows into his bedroom window – beautiful and present but inevitably destined to melt away in his hands.
- Book 1 Title: The Snow Queen
- Book 1 Biblio: Fourth Estate, $27.99 pb, 272 pp
The novel moves between the ordinary and daily encounters of these brothers, against larger American political events, such as the 2004 and 2008 US presidential elections. The Snow Queen indulges in moments of irony in showing how monumental political and social events in these characters’ lives are less defined by who the forthcoming president will be than by the necklace they will buy in the clothing store or by which street they choose to walk home at night.
Cunningham infuses his book with a litany of literary references, including his well-thumbed copy of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), which inspired his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (1998). These allusions are used to demonstrate how the banality of the everyday can provide moments of spectacular transcendence in his characters. While the novel’s ruminative tone and introspective digressions are immensely immersive to readers, they both nevertheless underscore the true alienation that intense self-awareness can reap to those afforded it.
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