By Nightfall, by Michael Cunningham Part 2

I finished Michael Cunningham's latest. I liked it more after finishing it, but I still wasn't blown away.

I do like that a "second-rate" artist represented by the art gallery owned by the main character is a Bard alum: "a kind and rather feckless young man named Bock Vincent, three years out of Bard, who lives with his much older girlfriend in Rhinebeck [although I don't think they'd live in Rhinebeck] and who is able, in a somewhat limited way, to talk about wrappings and bindings and their relationship to holiness..." Later it is said that "He was an oddball (even by Bard standards) when Peter met him.... Bard took a gamble on him. As did Peter."

But if the thing I like most is that my alma mater makes a random, somehow meaningful appearance and helps to define a secondary character who sort of represents the main character's disenchantment with his work? That doesn't say much for the book.