It's been fifteen years since The Hours. In 2009, Michael Cunningham told Variety, "While I was writing about Virginia Woolf, my mind was never far removed from the idea of girls in bikinis being hacked up by guys wearing hockey masks, and I vowed that if I ever had a good idea, I would write one of these scary movies." Then he sold a slasher flick called Beautiful Girl to Screen Gems. At the same time, he was finishing a Dusty Springfield biopic for Nicole Kidman but, alas, is not the Dusty Springfield biopic by Ray Connelly that Nick Hurran has just been hired to direct, possibly starring Adele. Michael wrote two screenplays that did get made, his own A Home at the End of the World (2004) and Evening (2007) with Susan Minot, as well as episode eight of Showtime's Masters of Sex to air on November 17. In 2011, he announced he was writing "a movie with Gus Van Sant, a fictionalised documentary set in 1912 Portland, Oregon." In 2012, he said he was adapting Turn of the Screw for a feature film and writing a pilot for HBO about a big queer family with adopted kids. Now, he's adapting Ann Leary's novel The Good House
for a film reteaming Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro for the fourth time. Today he's 61.
Following Specimen Days
and By Nightfall, next May FSG will release Michael's new novel, The Snow Queen, which is in part about a nonbeliever's unexpected turn to religion. Synopsis -- degayed? not gay? -- after the jump.
From HarperCollins UK:
"It’s November 2004. Barrett Meeks, having lost love yet again, is walking through Central Park when he is suddenly and inexplicably inspired to look up at the sky, where he sees a pale, translucent light that seems to regard him in a distinctly godlike way. Although Barrett doesn’t believe in visions—or in god, for that matter—he can’t deny what he’s seen.
"At the same time, in the not-quite-gentrified Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, Beth, who’s engaged to Barrett’s older brother ,Tyler, is dying of colon cancer. Beth, Tyler, and Barrett have cobbled together a more or less happy home. Tyler, a struggling musician with a drug problem, is trying and failing to write a wedding song for his wife-to-be—something that will be not merely a sentimental ballad but an enduring expression of eternal love.
Barrett, haunted by the light, turns unexpectedly to religion. Tyler grows increasingly convinced that only drugs can release his deepest creative powers. Beth tries to face mortality with as much courage and stoicism as she can summon.
"Cunningham follows the Meeks brothers as each turns down a decidedly different path in his search for transcendence. In subtle, lucid prose, he demonstrates a profound empathy for his conflicted characters and a singular understanding of what lies at the depth of the human soul."
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