By Nightfall, by Michael Cunningham

Art dealer Peter Harris is moderately successful, moderately happily married, and, at 43, feeling just a bit sick to his stomach. When his wife's twenty-year younger brother shows up for a visit, things begin to fall apart, in his marriage and his life. Ethan, known as "Mizzy," short for "The Mistake," is brilliant, drug-addicted, and manipulative. His androgynous appearance hauntingly recalls Peter's wife Rebecca's beauty at that age, and is powerfully attractive to Peter in its own right as well. Echoes of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain and Death in Venice set the literary tone of illness and blurred sexuality, while references to the modern gallery scene in New York do the same for the art world. Peter instinctively knows good and great art when he sees it; many readers have the same immediate reaction to well-written fiction, as I did to this beautifully written novel. Highly recommended. 238 pp.