Cunningham is best-known for a book that many more people have heard of than read: The Hours, which was made into a film starring Nicole Kidman’s prosthetic nose. I’ve read The Hours, as well as his more recent novel Nightfall, and the Snow Queen is much closer in style and content to the latter. I actually read [a Wikipedia summary of] the eponymous Hans Christian Andersen story before starting it, but, at least on the surface, it seems to have provided more of a loose association of motifs than a solid structural foundation for the novel.
The Snow Queen follows a group of New Yorkers living in squalid surroundings: brothers Tyler and Barrett, Tyler’s dying fiancee Beth, Barrett’s boss and Beth’s business partner Liz, Liz’s much younger boyfriend Andrew, and others. Based solely on a comparison of Nightfall and now this, it seems to me that what Cunningham really enjoys doing is imagining some characters into existence, putting some events/goals into their lives – Tyler, for example, is trying to write a song for his wedding to Beth, and Barrett is preoccupied with the physically beautiful Andrew – winding them up, letting them go, and then producing a novel which is a meditation on the results. So the plot is quite a loose structure in the end, more of a framework within which the characters explore who they are and why they make their particular choices.
This is a well-written novel without being particularly stunning. It’s not something I would like to read a lot of at a time – my preferences in terms of plot run more to Dickens than to Virginia Woolf – but it’s a nice change of pace to sit down with a book like this every once in a while.