This was not for me.
Michael Cunningham is a highly regarded author, whose bestselling novel The Hours won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award (made into an award-winning film starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Toni Collette).
I must be missing something, as I found The Snow Queen boring and banal.
Winter 2004. Barrett Meeks walks home across Central Park, looking up to see a vision of sparkling snow - a celestial light-filled aura as if God were looking directly on him. He lives in Brooklyn with his older brother Tyler (a musician who continues his coke habit on the sly) and Tyler's girlfriend Beth (dying of cancer). He works in a second-hand shop with owner Liz (slightly older than 38 year-old Barrett). Barrett would like a partner; Beth has a relapse; Tyler wants to record an album.
This is filled with observances by Cunningham on the few characters' daily lives. Nothing much happens. Barrett (getting ready in the morning) and arriving at work takes up 80 pages. Cunningham also has an (annoying) style of adding asides and afterthoughts (in brackets) to his sentences (as if they need supporting). When the novel ends four years later (in 2008), I found them no further ahead than when we started.
If there is no goal to be achieved, the novel becomes a character study. These characters didn't make any inroads (or reveal enough inner growth) to maintain my interest as a reader. If not plot or character, it comes down to the writing (there is always the hope for linguistic feats of beauty), but I was left unimpressed.
The Snow Queen is ranked as his best work after The Hours (so I must be missing something). The flyleaf states he demonstrates "an understanding of what lies at the core of the human soul." Every reader has the hope of (even on an entertainment level) a good story. For me, this didn't deliver (on any level).
2014 / Hardcover / 272 pages
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