Beautiful, true... and a little boring 
 Michael Cunningham writes beautifully, there is no question about that. Almost every page of his new novel reads as elegantly as it looks on the page. His prose is lucid and refined, without any trace of over-elaboration; indeed, he has an endearing habit of making parenthetical remarks to himself in descriptive passages (such as "face it" or "remember that?") that gives a pleasantly informal air to the whole. You may not know these people, but feel you might, and know that if you did happen to meet you would be welcomed into their circle. 
 And the characters and their lives also feel real: two forty-something brothers sharing an apartment in Brooklyn with the girlfriend of one of them. Barrett, the younger, is gay and works in a vintage store in Manhattan; on the way home one night, he sees a mysterious aqua light appear in the sky over Central Park, a miracle that he keeps to himself at first, but that turns him towards a kind of religion. Tyler, his older brother, is chasing his own miracle; a musician, he is still hoping for a breakthrough as a song-writer, and takes drugs to transport him to the necessary nirvana. Meanwhile, he is going ahead with his wedding to Beth (co-owner of the store where Tyler works), even though she is in the fourth stage of cancer. 
 I don't really remember the Hans Andersen story of the same title that Cunningham is apparently reworking here, nor am I sure of its essential point.* Certainly, there is a lot of snow and ice imagery, literal and otherwise, and I think I see a common theme of two people (though by no means children here) living close together in an urban setting, until each finds a way to unlock something essential that had been frozen within them. Section by section, chapter by short chapter, the affairs, hopes, and delusions of these three people and their immediate friends are portrayed with wonderful reality. Further, their situation changes in slow but significant ways over the four-year span--the novel runs from the presidential elections of 2004 to those of 2008, and Cunningham makes no secret of his sympathies. But I felt very little direction or momentum as I was reading, and could easily have laid it down at any time and not bothered to pick it up again. 
 ====== 
 * 
 At the time I was writing this review, I did not yet have a grand-daughter of an age to be in love with Disney's Frozen!