I knew little of Michael Cunningham’s work (I just knew that he wrote The Hours which was an Academy Award-winning film my parents loved) so I had no fixed expectations. I gave myself four days to finish this book but managed to do so in three days. That’s how captivating it was. Cunningham’s experimental fiction was masterfully told, like a musical composition that rises and falls with the right notes. In Specimen Days, he writes in three genres, dividing the book into three breathtaking novellas.***"A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child?… .I do not know what it is any more than he.” ~Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass(1) “In The Machine” A Historical Dickensian TaleThe first novella was written in the boy Lucas’ POV. It was set sometime during the industrialization age of America. Lucas’ brother Simon has just died and this left his fiancee Catherine uncared for and with child. Though aready shouldering the financial burden of supporting his parents, thirteen-year-old Lucas still felt it was his responsibility to watch out after Catherine. He was a peculiar boy, reciting Walt Whitman poetry as his way to express his feelings or to make conversation. Through Lucas’ narrations, Cunningham’s knack for weaving lyrical phrases is astounding. The paragraphs contain such breathless pacing and descriptive precision which magnified the strength of Lucas’ evocative insights about his surroundings as he tries to understand the concept of labor and death. He wants to de-mystify such adult concepts and it is Whitman’s poetry that guides him. At the very heart of it all, Lucas begins to explore the possibility that his brother’s soul was trapped inside the welding machinery that Lucas uses at his work in the factory. Believing that if men die and they spread out among the leaves and grass (as Whitman eloquently wrote), Lucas was convinced that ghosts dwell among the machinery across New York, including the sewing machine that Catherine tends to at her own workplace. He ventures on to save her.For such a comical angle to the story, Cunningham was still able to approach it with great sensitivity, providing passages that brood over the simplest but unanswered questions about life which gives Lucas’ character a crushing sort of loneliness. He is a child who tries to make sense of the world by allowing poetry to fill the gaps. It’s a feat that manages to intensify the reading experience even more, and Cunningham drives it home by using Lucas’ “ghost” as an allegory of the American industrialization’s hovering presence, and the gradual withdrawal of human spirit from the organic towards the mechanical. Lucas’ belief of souls being trapped in the machines is a symbolism easy to pick up on, but Cunningham’s beautifully convoluted prose is rich with details that it was able to keep everything subtle. The climactic ending was even transitory to the next novella. Reading In the Machine was like stumbling in the dark, and trusting all the sensory directions given, but never truly seeing the big picture forming until the novel moves into the second story."And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier."(2) “The Children’s Crusade” A Detective Psychological ThrillerThe sudden shift of genre by the second novella was not at all jarring. This time it was set on a post-9/11 New York with Cat Martin, a forensic psychologist, as a focus character. She works for a hotline division who handles calls from possible terrorists. She got a message from a young boy who talked about “the family” and recites mantras like "Every atom belonging to you as well belongs to me," which she recognized to be a verse from a Walt Whitman poem. Days after, news of child terrorists have spread across the city, claiming both the rich and the poor as victims of homemade bombs. At first glance, this story doesn’t have any sort of connection to the first one until the reader realizes that Cat was short for “Catherine” and her boyfriend’s name is “Simon” and she has a son named “Luke” whom she lost to an illness. But these are differrent characters with the same names and are a century apart from each other, yet Cunningham weaves these two stories—one of the past and one from the somewhat present—as a dissonance of worlds that are created through the choices of these three central characters. Whatever the boy Lucas from the first story feared about then, those ghosts he talked about, have now taken shape into something horribly concrete in Cat Martin’s New York where a heightened sense of paranoia and grief is exploited by a terrorist cell composed of children.It was a detective story, hard-boiled and suspenseful with every turn of the page—right until the moment of a chance meeting between Cat and one of the child terrorists. In this story, Cunningham delves into the scarlet thread so immensely significant in detective stories and The Children’s Crusadebecame a harrowing tale that overflows with the twisted reflections of humanity’s fears. It was by this installment that I started to tear up completely because Cunningham has a way to string along certain phrases that provokes such a visceral, emotional response that a reader just surrenders without even knowing it. It was juxtaposed perfectly with In The Machine, especially since he used the three characters (Catherine, Simon and Lucas) as representations of man, woman and child; three aspects poignantly enhanced by the last novella."Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you,And yet the same old human race, the same within, without,Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearning the sameThe same old love, beauty and use the same.”(3) “Like Beauty” A Sci-Fi Love Story About Birth and DestinationThe final novella was set 150 years in the future in New York. Humans have already made first contact with aliens and they are lizard life-forms called Nadians who are now living as refugees in planet Earth. They are domestic helpers, treated as secondary citizens and enslaved by mankind. Simon—a biomechanical cyborg—is the focus character, and he was programmed as a mugger in the New York streets, sought after by tourists who want to be victimized because of the adrenaline release it provides. He was captivated by a Nadian called Catareen whom he starts an adventure with when they decided to escape to Denver. On the road, they met a homeless boy posing as Jesus in a Halloween costume named Lucas. This story was the most challenging of the three because it was science fiction and there is always a strange pull with this genre that Cunningham was able to give justice to. Simon was a biomechanical conception; half-human and half-machine (a literal representation of Lucas’ ghost of a brother from the first story) and his ‘maker’ has included Whitman poetry in his software which he recites every time under duress. What follows after is a redemptive tale about the power of technology and a more humane understanding of how it can enrich lives instead of destroy them.There is an enduring quality to the prose of this story that was magnified by the previous events from In The Machine and The Children’s Crusade. It seemed to me that these versions of Simon, Catherine and Lucas are products of the past and present colliding together to form a future defined by beginnings and endings that mirror each other. So many imagery and symbolism come full circle by this last story. Religious allegories were also used. I was listening to Death Cab For Cutie’s “Tiny Vessels” so I was positively imbued with emotions and sensations that can only be expressed in tears. It didn’t feel cheesy at all because it seemed like a perfectly acceptable response to cry about this book because of its overwhelming poetry in its vitalizing prose.*Overall, Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days is a treasure. As you read through, it feels like seeds are sprouting out from your heart and flourishes within, transforming you as a reader into a person more aware of transience and embracing its trappings.RECOMMENDED: 10/10
I generally LOVE Michael Cunningham, but I felt he was copying his "literature borrowing" idea from The Hours. He was experimenting with form, but it didn't work for me. Three stories linked to one work - the author shows up in the earliest story - that's what he borrowed from The Hours. In Specimen Days, Cunningham offers three novels based on Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. In the first novella, set in Victorian NYC, a mentally-challenged factory worker has taken his dead brother's job even as the boy obsesses about the poet. The boy starts to hear his brother's ghost in the machines. In the second, a modern, NYC police woman investigates a gang of terrorist children motivated by Whitman's work. The third is about an android and an alien trying to escape future NYC; the android has a Whitman app built into his brain...The first story is Grand Guignol, like Sweeney Todd - melodrama. The second is a modern urban terrorist plot with child gangs, with a little VC Andrews thrown in. The third is speculative science fiction. Weird combo.It doesn't jibe as well as The Hours; the disparate styles create distance instead of unity. I felt like he was experimenting, like what Michael Chabon does more successfully, but Cunningham is more interested in prose than plot, so the drive wasn't as there to captivate the readers. These stories are pretty, just not gripping. There was no party to anticipate, like in The Hours. In the third story of Specimen Days, the big climactic moment happens halfway through the tale. In the second novella, the overlap of themes of terrorism and child-rearing seems odd. I liked the first tale the most (even though I generally ain't a fan of melodramatic ghost stories), and I like that each of the three tales explored forms of resistance and terrorism - though I wish, again, they'd been more unified. And I'm not sure what this sort of defiance has to do with Whitman.MC is a gorgeous writer. And I love that he went out on a limb. It's a nice, interesting read - just not emotionally or intellectually gripping.BTW, I met Cunningham in 2007, and he signed all my books at the time, filling them with personal notes. We both went through the Iowa Writer's Workshop, so we had that...and other stuff...in common. He's extraordinarily intelligent and witty; if you hear of a speaking engagement, go. UPON FURTHER THOUGHT:I should add that Whitman was very much an admirer of the common man and the disenfranchised. With the characters in all three books (minus the maternal detective of he second), Cunningham tries to cpture this.Whitman opposed slavery, and he was the “American poet” at a time of great upheaval in our country. He worked through the Civil War, the influx of immigrants into the West for riches, that same influx into the Midwest for farmland, the changing of the Northeast by pogrom immigration, the birth of unions, and the start of American anarchy and communist sentiment. The idea of the need for uprising and anarchy run through all three stories, but I don’t feel Whitman wrote about those political ideas specifically. Whitman was interested in true equality of all people, including the slaves. Maybe Cunningham is saying something about how respect of the common person and the disenfranchised is the start of them respecting themselves, leading to their unionizing, their uprising. Maybe Cunningham is showing how Whitman’s peaceful work can be turns to revolution and violence. Maybe Cunningham is showing that there will always be a disenfranchised, the handicapped, children and – in the future – aliens and androids, possibly.Whitman was gay, and Cunningham is. Cunningham seems to shy from pulling in this aspect. Again, perhaps that’s on purpose.In short, I love leaving a book asking questions. I could’ve asked questions about the common people, the disenfranchised, and how great works inspire and goad them throughout time. I don’t, though. The only question I don’t like asking at the end of a book is, “What the heck was the author intending?” With the disparate styles, the unstated disunity of theme and subject, I’m asking it here.
What do You think about Specimen Days (2006)?
I have to preface this review by saying this is the first Michael Cunningham novel I have read -- I'm not familiar with "The Hours" nor the movie of the same name (although I do have the Philip Glass soundtrack). With that in mind, read on:I have just finished "Specimen Days - A Novel" by Michael Cunningham. The book is set in three parts, whereas the first takes place approximately a hundred years in the past, the second in the near present or near future, and the third in the distant future. The three parts are linked by characters which despite sharing names do not share the same attributes; a certain inanimate object; and the poetry of Walt Whitman.For those who might not know, "Specimen Days" is also the title of a prose-poetry book by Whitman described as "autobiographic"... but it is much more than that; everyone needs to read both "Specimen Days" back to back to appreciate what Cunningham has wrought.Of the three sections, the first is the most compelling. I can't say much without revealing plot, so I'll generalize by saying the imagery and symbolism are most vivid in the first section, perhaps because the author is trying to recreate a world already gone before we were born. The second section, depicting the world we live in now, seems wan in comparison; the effect is similar to placing a black and white photograph beside an impressionist's painting -- the riot of color in the painting makes the black and white photograph seem two-dimensional and less substantial. The third section takes place about four centuries in the future and is still less vivid than the first section, but does have more imagery than the second section. A key scene in the park, a chase scene, and a swimming scene stand out in my recollection of the final section.My intuition tells me that the author sees more than the obvious connection between the three sections of this novel. There are themes: the first that comes to mind is Whitman and his life-celebrating "Leaves of Grass." The second theme is a juxtaposition of the beauty of inanimate things with the often-banal daily existence of living things (or maybe the point I missed is the fragility of all things, living and inanimate, and how this fragility binds us together as we all seek to survive). A third theme is the question of what constitutes a life. A fourth could be related to the color green (even the dust jacket and spine are green), although I'm struggling to remember any reference to it in the second section... creative choice or oversight? There's also death, and renewal -- children figure prominently in all three sections. The setting of Gotham/New York City is an obvious thread. Loss and longing are common threads, and the desire to survive. Movement from the familiar into the unknown also binds the sections together.At the end of the novel I'm left with each of these themes (and perhaps more, subconsciously) as my mind seeks to join the three events together. Its a clever device, similar to placing three seemingly unrelated photographs side by side and leaving them for everyone who follows to attempt to decipher not only the underlying story that connects them but also the artist's intent for choosing those particular photos and placing them in that particular sequence. The unfinished nature of each section leaves them hovering in the mind's eye like landscapes glimpsed through the window of a speeding train, joined only by the rails and the relativity of the traveler. This would be an excellent book club novel, as it contains so much that is open to interpretation and each reader is going to synthesize the connections differently.I will say that as a stand-alone opening of a science fiction novel the third section was fantastic, and I would have enjoyed a book length treatment of the issues brought up in the last section to see where the author would take them. Michael Cunningham, if you're reading this, change the ending of the third section and make it the opening third of a novel and answer the questions you honed in "Specimen Days." Actually, each of these sections could have been expanded into deeply insightful and probing novels, which might explain why I've come away from this book feeling as if I've dined at the table but I'm not sated.Perhaps, if we're very lucky, the author will publish a sequel with three more sections equally intertwined whereby we pick up the stories of these carefully crafted characters and delve even more deeply into the themes outlined above while learning where their destinies take them. Having tasted the power of what was offered, I would leap at the chance to enjoy more.Thank you Michael Cunningham!Now that I've discovered that this isn't the first book of three juxtaposed sections Mr. Cunningham has written, it becomes obvious that he's experimenting with the "collage as literary device" that he began in the other book. The difficulty of composing and coordinating three different interlocking works of fiction based upon the issues and writings of another writer (the fourth dimension) and spaced out across time (the fifth dimension) cannot be exaggerated. Writing in three dimensions overwhelms most aspiring writers. Writing fiction in five dimensions is a new art form, and I love it. If you want ordinary writers and novels, look elsewhere. If you want extraordinary writing and reading, choose Michael Cunningham.
—Chip
Three novellas set in New York in different centuries, linked by three similar characters (a woman, a man and a disfigured kid), the poetry of Walt Whitman and, why not, a small white bowl. It took me about a year to get through this book, so I can't guarantee that the presence of the bowl doesn't have a deeper signification. If it does, I missed it. Must be a pretty special bowl though, to get through the industrial revolution, present day America, post-apocalyptic alien populated world, and then be flown into space to some distant planet. In any case, the stories are good.In The Machine is my favorite and, taking the shape of a ghost story, a great metaphor of the industrial revolution. The narrator assumes a depressing tone to covey the threatening nature of the machines in a world afraid and overwhelmed by rapid change. The lower class characters fill every page with palpable sadness and hopelessness and with the fear that an increased use of the machines will lower their worth. Walt Whitman appears as a character. The Children's Crusade is a crime thriller revolving around a forensic psychologist who fields calls from potential terrorists. When one of her callers, an orphaned young boy, is involved in a suicide bombing, a police investigation is launched. Not a genre I favor, I consider the police story to be the low point of the book (albeit good).The last novella, Like Beauty, is set in a future where humans have made contact with lizard-like aliens, some of whom were shipped to earth to do menial jobs. It's a story of friendship, which could also be read as a love story, between a male android and a female alien lizard, who are on the run from the authorities. Tomcruise and Katemoss make an appearance as little brats. An enjoyable book overall, I only wish I'd stuck with it for a few days instead of dragging it out for months.
—Xandra
I think this is a beautiful novel. Because for me imagination in fiction counts for a lot, I admire this novel very much. In some ways it's a stronger work than I originally thought when I 1st read it a few years ago. This reading, however, I thought the 3d section, "Like Beauty," is weaker than I remembered, making it somewhat less novel, though still very impressive. Specimen Days is 3 novellas built around the model of Dante's Divine Comedy. Each novella uses some of the same elements: names of characters, New York City localities, the fact of a bowl passed through time from "In the Machine" to "The Children's Crusade" to "Like Beauty." And, of course, Cunningham's most distinguishing unifier is that Walt Whitman has a presence in characters who compulsively and at random, inappropriate times quote him. In fact, Whitman himself appears in the 1st novella, set in the New York City of the late 19th century. What function do Whitman's expansive and rapturous quotes from Leaves of Grass serve in the novel? I think Whitman is the Virgil guiding Dante through his metaphysical model. Dante himself in each story is a young deformed boy named Luke. Beatrice, Dante's love and model of spiritual perfection, is Catherine or Cat or Catareen. What's different for me this reading is that while I'd recognized in the previous reading that each novella represents in turn Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, I think I discovered that each of them moves completely through the Dantean model. Dante/Luke is shown Paradise 3 times. Every section is redemptive. While it's still true in a very general, loose sense that the successive stories represent the 3 sections of Dante's universe, so that "In the Machine" parallels Inferno, for instance, it's also true that Dante's journey is completed 3 times. I like this novel very much. I like this kind of novel very much, what Harold Bloom says we used to call imaginative fiction. Reading and understanding a novel like this, a novel erected around such a heavy theme, discovering its particular beauty, is to be led into Paradiso itself. I begin reading early each day before daylight, and in front of a large window facing the street. Reading, I'm aware of morning filling the street while the grandeur of a novel like Specimen Days fills my mind. At some point I can look up to see that, just as Cat/Beatrice showed Luke/Dante at the end of "The Children's Crusade," morning is everywhere. Splendor in the street, splendor in my lap.
—James Murphy
