Michael Cunningham's 1999 The Hours is a masterful novel -- perhaps the last great novel to close out the 20th century in American fiction. Between the bestseller rankings, the critical fanfare and the Pulitzer Prize, the book's public reception was considerable and well-deserved. But at its heart, The Hours is a pitch-perfect example of the novel as a subtle art form and Cunningham is an example of the writer as prophet of the intricate beauty of everyday life.
Given this, it is near impossible to read his fourth work, Specimen Days, without standing in the shadow of his previous masterpiece. Both novels are structured around three temporally disparate narratives, both are inhabited by characters eerily similar to one another and both revolve around a central champion of literature. In The Hours, that was the English writer Virginia Woolf; for his latest novel, Cunningham has chosen the emblematic American poet Walt Whitman.
The similarities mostly end there. Though Specimen Days lacks the emotional wallop and aftershocks of The Hours, it remains a brave literary experiment emboldened by intriguing ideas and fascinating writing.
The triptych contains three separate stories, each a window into a particular era in the past, present and future of New York City. The first, "In the Machine," is an Industrial Revolution-era ghost story involving a malformed young boy named Lucas who walks around spouting lines from Whitman's Leaves of Grass in epileptic bursts. After his older brother, Simon, dies in a violent machine accident, Lucas takes his place at the metal works and begins to fall in love with his brother's fiancée, Catherine.
Like Whitman's poetry, Cunningham's tale is concerned with the life force inherent in everything, even something as lifeless as a machine. Describing the noise of the metal press Lucas operates (the same machine that mangled his brother's body), Cunningham writes, "It had the rhythm of a voice, the rise and fall and rise again suggesting intention rather than accident, the tone implying a certain urgency more human than mechanical, as if the sound were being made by some entity struggling to be heard."
From here, the three principle characters are resurrected into post-Sept. 11th New York City. "The Children's Crusade" is a contemporary crime story and is the best of Cunningham's three experiments with genre fiction. Cat is a psychologist for the police department dating a powerful executive (Simon) who finds herself drawn into a series of attacks by child suicide bombers (one of whom is named Lucas). The Whitman connection: the ideology of the bombers has its roots in Whitman's poetics and their leader goes by the name of Walt Whitman.
The culminating short story, "Like Beauty," is most problematic -- the idea of a "literary" writer stepping into the territory of sci-fi thriller seems an awkward, impossible feat. Yet Cunningham's language reads well in this unfamiliar genre.
Here the three characters are fugitives from New York City (now a theme park modeled on the 21st century experience) trying to find their future out West while avoiding the Big Brother-esque grasp of yet another futuristic dystopia. Though the chase sequences are tough to swallow, Cunningham's descriptions of the future world display a talent that transcends space and time.
The stories read awkwardly at times and the Whitman connection is a little forced, but Specimen Days is a valuable literary experiment. The narrative styles might seem like small shoes for someone of Cunningham's talents, but here he jams his feet inside and, however uncomfortably, runs his best race.
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