Land's End : A Walk In Provincetown

Land's End: A Walk In Provincetown is the Michael Cunningham short nonfiction book that takes his novelist's eye to the Cape Cod town where he has spent decades of summers. The book is structured as a walking tour through the town, with Cunningham moving from Commercial Street through the side streets and out to the dunes, weaving local history with personal observation and the kind of careful sensory writing that his fiction has always specialized in.

Cunningham's strength in Land's End is the same as in his fiction. The prose is unusually lyrical for what is technically a guidebook. The town's history (the Portuguese-fishing roots, the painters' colony era, the AIDS crisis, the contemporary gay-tourism economy) is rendered with the kind of careful affection that comes from a writer who knows the place by foot. Fans of Mary Oliver's nature essays or of Lia Purpura's prose will recognize the careful observational register.

The book is short and reads in an afternoon.

Four stars. A small good book. Recommended to readers of literary nonfiction and to anyone who has spent time in Provincetown. The Land's End Michael Cunningham guidebook works as both a companion to The Hours and as a standalone introduction to a particular American place.