In the Flesh

If novelist Michael Cunningham's life were to be written as a picaresque adventure entitled Michael Cunningham, it would open in a Pasadena bedroom with a boy shout ing the lyrics to "Positively Fourth Street" and grind ing his hips like Diana Ross. It would segue from sem ma! influences (Genet) to San Francisco to a Nebraska farm, where our hero attempts to learn cattle butchery from a library book. Characters of "courageous oddness" would pass through the pages, delighting the young artist as he meanders through the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the love of good women, and—eventually—the love of good men. There would be acting out, ACTing UP, a first novel (Golden States), which our modest hero asks us to forget, and a second (A Home at the End of the World), which many readers will never forget.

The newest chapter? Cunningham's third novel, Flesh and Blood (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), in which he attempts "to write a 2,000-page novel in under 500 pages." The book buzzcuts like Edward Scissorhands through the conventionally dull pastures of the American family saga. ("And can I tell you a little secret of mine?" a suburban matron counsels a drag queen on a summer day. "I put my bra and panties in the freezer overnight.") It started picking up praise about 15 minutes after Cunningham switched off his laptop. Movie people threw out feelers; Publishers Weekly threw stars. But he isn't strutting (except maybe on Fridays at Squeezebox). "This is what I can do," he says. "And I'm doing it." His worst fear? That the empathy and lyricism which are his trademarks will make people think he's just a softy. "Yes," he confesses, "I worry that my writing is a fat boy in gym class who no one wants on their team."

GEORGE HODGMAN