Rating: 
Summary: Subtle and unflinching
Review: Training his perceptive eye on one family, Cunningham explores contemporary - and timeless - issues of American culture in a voice that combines emotional power with sensitive portrayals of character.Structured chronologically by year, the novel is organized in sharply etched vignettes, from which patterns of personality emerge. It opens in 1935 with a vivid glimpse of Constantine's hardscrabble life as the son of a Greek peasant farmer, then jumps to 1949, with Constantine, the young immigrant, in love with Mary. "He had a second life now, inside her head. He worried, almost every moment, that she would realize her mistake." By Easter 1958, Mary, the working class girl from Newark, has three children. Striving for perfection in a cake shaped like a bunny, she is harried by the demands of her family and too little money. When their son, Billy, wakes while she and Constantine are filling Easter baskets, spoiling the surprise of them, Constantine loses his temper. "He might have conquered his own anger if Billy had remained defiant. But Billy began to cry and without quite having decided to, Constantine was shaking him....." The scene grows, Mary frantic, throwing herself over Billy. "Constantine was in a passion now, a crackling white glory. Delirious, he knocked the baskets off the table. Jelly beans sprayed like stones against the walls. Chocolate lambs broke on the floor, plastic eggs cracked open and spilled out the trinkets Mary had hidden inside. He started to ram his fist into the cake." But instead of destroying the cake, Constantine falls into a passion of regret, begging forgiveness from his son and wife. "She neither welcomed nor recoiled from his touch." This is a pattern set for life; Mary striving for perfection in the appearance of things, Constantine raging at the imperfections of his wife, his son, the life he had envisioned for himself in 1949. And when Constantine stikes it rich, comparatively, by becoming partners with a Greek contractor building tract homes, the money solves nothing. Mary worries about fitting in in affluent suburbia; her eyes are opened to new horrors of failure. Billy, especially, is a disappointment to his father. Brooding, effeminate, Billy grows increasingly bitter and isolated. After a particularly violent scene, the teenager Billy remarks to his older sister, Susan, " 'Have you noticed how he never breaks stuff?' " Only Susan seems to have a handle on life. She takes after her mother, follows the rules, fits in with the cheerleaders and football players, has a shot at becoming Homecoming Queen. She's the peacemaker and on the night Billy vows to someday kill his father she goes to Constantine with soothing words and, finally, feeling the power sexuality can bring her, a most undaughterly kiss. Zoe, the youngest, is an unknown. There's something wild and feral about her but only Zoe seems to stay completely clear of domestic storms. Reeling from the loss of the Homecoming Queen crown, seeing herself clearly branded as Italian-Greek interloper, Susan decides on impulse to marry Todd, her insider boyfriend, and thereby escape her father's continuing clandestine "kisses and hugs." This is one of the book's few jarring notes. Susan, accepted at college, ambitious and vaguely contemptuous of the boyfriend who wants nothing more than to continue the life he's always known, has other means of escape. Instead she lets her mother organize an elaborate suburban ritual. "The wedding was flawless, except for the guests." Mary regards Constantine's colleagues balefully. Subject to vague sharp stabs of anger, Mary takes a pill and concentrates on her daughter. "It seemed that Susan had gone to another country, where all the girls were effortlessly thin and beautiful and all the boys had futures sturdy as suspension bridges....This one, at least, was safe." So little do parents know their children. Zoe slips into a drifting life in New York City where her best friend is a drag queen and her days are taken up with sex and drugs. She conceives a child by a black man who never knows of the pregnancy - the child remains an oddity to his grandparents who dote on Susan's boy, Ben - a rugged docile child whose inner life is a turmoil of secrets. Ironically, Ben's biggest secret is his burgeoning homosexuality, the same tendency Constantine spent his youth trying to beat out of Billy. Billy seizes his independence from family the minute he goes off to Harvard as an undergraduate. He works at it, changing his name to Will, living in squalor, perpetuating several non-violent but nonetheless seering cruelties upon his parents. But he makes a life for himself, teaching, living quietly in Boston's gay community, eventually falling in love and coming to terms with some of his demons. The episodic structure of the novel lends itself to drama and melodrama. But Cunningham's subtle portrayal of character imbues each scene with delicacy of feeling. Although people often react to the buttons others deliberately push, Cunningham explores the underlying complexities. In this way he successfully puts individual faces on such broad issues as AIDS, homosexuality, family violence, adultery, suburban posturing and, through it all, intergenerational misunderstanding. Without being heavy-handed about it, Cunningham underlines the unchangeable constant - one person can never completely see into the heart and soul of another. "Flesh and Blood" is a marvelous work, moving, thought-provoking and wholly absorbing.
Rating:
Summary: Masterful and goosebump-inducing saga
Review: Twenty-four hours after finishing FLESH AND BLOOD, my goosebumps are only now subsiding. It's rare to read a novel with multiple generations where each character sticks in your mind -- often authors lose their readers when they switch to the next generation, but Cunningham keeps the older generation alive in our minds and on the pages as he lets us get to know the "kids." Every relationship is fully realized, and there are certainly a wide variety of relationships in this satisfying book! Poetic and oh-so-real. People don't have major epiphanies right and left, Hollywood-style. They change very slowly over a long time. Cunningham is a compassionate chronicler of human frailty.
Rating:
Summary: Love and compassion
Review: What I enjoyed most about this novel was the detail, the completeness with which Michael Cunningham creates for his characters the rooms and worldviews we all make for ourselves inside our heads. The Stassos family members look at their lives and at others from these windows of theirs and we are transported with them, absorbed into their outlooks. While I was reading I felt a little like a voyeur, witness not only to the passions and actions of these characters, but also to their most intimate thoughts, even the most fleeting ones, those we all have and never share. These are people! Alive, imperfect, struggling: they don't understand themselves fully, but they live and live, happiness blinking in and out of the picture.
I have read some negative criticisms about the novel's ending, yet I thought it was perfect and unavoidable for the way this story was told. Other family sagas end with a moment of revelation or reinterpretation; conflicts are solved or given meaning or perspective beyond what they've had up to then. But here something different happens, something unconventional from a literary point of view, thus easily judged as an imperfection. For me it made the novel all more human, as if it itself became, at last, another character.
Rating: 
Summary: overview of Michael Cunningham's three novels
Review: When I read The Hours I was totally blown away by Mr Cunningham's use of language and the absolutely brilliant way in which he blended Virginia Wolf's writing and life with his characters. Seamless is what others have said and I can't agree more. Perhaps it is because Mr. Cunningham is now a more seasoned writer--but I found his earlier work disappointing.. I kept having to go back to see whether I was getting Bobby and Jonathan mixed up their voices seemed to blend. In the book Flesh and Blood I kept seeing the same themes repeated from the other books. In any case I find him to be very talented writer and am eagerly awaiting his next novel with the fervent hope that it comes up to The Hours. Evelyn Apte
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful epic
Review: When I was first given this book by a friend and began reading I was initially disturbed by Constantine and his cruelty. I put the book down and it sit on my bedstand for 2 months. I knew that I would finish it, at some point. Yesterday I picked it up again and well, I didn't get much sleep last night! I found the book beautifully written. Wonderful, complex characters. Dark and duplicitous. I have never cried and laughed aloud reading a book before. I found myself thinking 'What a gift to us, the readers'. Flesh and Blood is now on my 'A' list. Thanks Michael
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