Is It Possible to Go Get Peace?
After my brother takes me to the Jets game this afternoon, my wife and I are going to jump in the car to Provincetown for a much needed vacation. We are hoping to do nothing and find peace there, just as Michael Cunningham has:
Even during the summer, the novelist Michael Cunningham was talking about fall in this Cape Cod town. In October, when the tourists and drag queens thin out, and the slanting sunlight floods the town with reds and yellows, it is folly to try to get anything done. It is enough to make a working writer eager for the premature winter blight of Cape Cod in November.
As a novelist, Mr. Cunningham is most adept at portraying his characters' awareness of being out of place. But in his Provincetown chronicle, he draws a haven that is unsparingly hospitable, as accommodating to tourist families as to gay party crowds.
With Land's End finished, his next novel--three interrelated novellas involving Walt Whitman--has come freely. He writes in the morning, before the duties of the day stamp their urgency over his dreams. "And afternoons, we're `at home' in the 19th-century sense," he said.
"People actually drop in here," he added. "It's not like in New York."
9:35:36 AM 
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