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The brilliant Michael Cunningham’s fifth novel is actually three stories vastly separated in time but with commonalities of place and character names.
Also tying together the stories — novellas, actually — is the poetry of Walt Whitman, which is woven through the book.
The book is ambitious not only in structure but in writing style. Like a musical virtuoso so familiar with his instrument that he has to increase the degree of difficulty to remain amused, the Cincinnati native writes each section of the book in a different genre — gothic ghost story, noir thriller, and science fiction.
First of three parts
The first section, “In the Machine,” is a Gothic ghost story set in New York City in the 1870s during the industrial revolution. A desperately poor Irish boy, now the sole breadwinner for his family, takes his brother’s place at a dangerous machine in an iron stamping factory after the brother, Simon, is mangled and killed by the machine.
The adolescent Lucas, who is fixated on Walt Whitman and helplessly spouts his poetry in the grip of a kind of literary Tourette’s Syndrome, also is fixated on his brother’s fiancée, Catherine. Lucas comes to believe his brother’s ghost is imprisoned in the stamping-plant machine, and thinks Simon is trying to arrange Catherine’s death by machine, so she can join him in the afterlife.
Second iteration
In the second section, “The Children’s Crusade,” Catherine is now Cat, an African-American forensic psychologist. Her boyfriend, Simon, is a handsome younger businessman, and Lucas has morphed into Luke, a member of a band of child terrorists and also the name of Cat’s dead son.
The story is set in post-9/11 New York City, and it unfolds like a modern noir thriller. The young terrorists are suicide bombers who spout Whitman to rationalize the murders. The only person they’ll talk to is Cat, who staffs a hot line that deals with the crazies who threaten violence. While trying to get to the bottom of the crimes, Cat forges a relationship with one of the boys.
Third stage: “Like Beauty”
The third story, “Like Beauty,” is set in a New York City of the future, where Simon is again trapped in a machine. This time, he’s a humanlike robot and Catherine is Catareen, a lizardlike alien who is employed as a child-care worker in the Old New York theme park. Simon, who longs to be more human, takes Catareen on a road trip to Denver to search for his maker.
“Specimen Days” has been called “an extravagant novel of human progress and social decline” (Publisher’s Weekly), “a galvanizing novel about the quest for justice and freedom, the parameters of the soul, the hunger for beauty, and the fluid interface between the natural and the engineered” (American Library Association) and a book about “…human connection among misfits of every ilk, our constant pain of loss, and our equally constant striving for solace” (Ethan Canin, Washington Post Book World).
Whitman speaks from the past
Specimen Days is all of these things, but at its core it is a novel - or a triptych of stories - about the palpable endurance of the human spirit over generations and centuries.
Cunningham illuminates the genesis of his interest in the theme in an interview with Dave Weich on Powells.com:
“…I was reading Leaves of Grass in college and got to a particular passage, which is something like, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘Reader, wherever you are in the future, know that I am as alive and present in the world now as you will be when you read this book, even though I and my world are gone. Is it night where you are? Is the lamp lit?’
“It was, and it was! Time collapsed, and Walt Whitman rose up off the page in his full aliveness, though he was not alive in the present. I think I understood deeply for the first time at that moment how great literature can transcend mortality.”
The book is lush enough to encompass several themes. Cunningham variously ponders technology, class differences and bigotry, and ruminates on the randomness of fate in this passage from “The Children’s Crusade”:
“”Today they’d been reminded, we’d been reminded, of something much of the rest of the world had known for centuries - that you could easily, at any moment , make your fatal mistake. That we all humped along unharmed because no one had decided to kill us that day. That we could not know, as we hurried about our business, whether we were escaping the conflagration or rushing into it.”
In the end, Cunningham asks, does it really matter?
Specimen Days
By Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005
ISBN-10: 0312425023
ISBN-13: 978-0312425029
