There is the art world; and then there is art. How much has one to do with the other? This is a question most readers of this magazine have probably asked at some point during their journey through late twentieth- and early twenty-first century cultural life, with its commodification of the new, the outré, the painstakingly “transgressive.” For decades now we have watched Chelsea and Soho tastemakers struggle to “find a balance,” as the novelist Michael Cunningham puts it, “between sentiment and irony, between beauty and rigor, and in so doing open a crack in the substance of the world through which mortal truth might shine.”

Cunningham is one of those valuable novelists who is just as interested in ideas as he is in literary aesthetics, and in his new book, By Nightfall, he grapples with both: aging, the meaning and importance of art, the search for untouched beauty in a tainted world. His protagonist is the Soho version of Everyman. Peter Harris is a successful art dealer who has just turned forty-four. Not one of the most successful; “If he doesn’t step up soon, he can probably expect to grow old as a solid, minor dealer, respected but not feared.” He wears pretentious eyeglasses and lunches only at the trendiest bistros. His wife, Rebecca, edits an arts and culture magazine called Blue Light. Their Mercer Street loft is a prototype for bohemian bourgeois luxe, interchangeable with any number of other “cutting edge” abodes