From Hours to Days

If you read Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours and were anxiously awaiting his new novel, then you will enjoy Specimen Days for its finely wrought prose and layered narrative.

If you missed The Hours, then by all means read it as it’s a wonderfully written story that captures the flavour of Virginia Woolf’s writing perfectly—but you should also read Specimen Days. Not because it evokes the ghost of a long-dead writer (Walt Whitman) or because it pulls you in to three different worlds (two of which, as a reader in 2005, you will never inhabit) but because his writing is so beautiful.

The novel is filled with passages like “In the sky, the great celestial horse turned its enormous head. An unspeakable beauty announced itself.”

I’m a sucker for an elegant prose style, and Michael Cunningham has that in spades.

The poetry of Walt Whitman is central to this novel, and images from Leaves of Grass appear throughout, giving beauty a powerful presence in a novel that is sometimes very bleak. That is what makes Specimen Days such a compelling read: beauty and its destruction walk hand in hand at times in this book, and beauty, whether in one character’s act of kindness towards another, or quotations from Whitman’s poetry, is what redeems the characters, and by extension the human race.

The New York that the novel depicts is at times a ghostly one; the three parts of Specimen Days occur during the start of the Industrial Revolution, the early 21st century, and a futuristic New York that can only pretend to be what it once was. Whitman’s poetry links the three parts together and provides an additional sense of continuity throughout the novel. The same streets and thoroughfares appear in the New York of the past, present, and future and provide a welcome touchstone throughout Specimen Days’ shifting eras and characters.

The middle part of the novel, “The Children’s Crusade,” is the one that made me really enjoy Specimen Days, and is the one that I found very powerful.

It asks us to look at the lives that many North Americans lead, with good health, enough to eat, and wonder why on some level the inhabitants of one of the wealthiest continents on Earth are so unhappy.

What would it take to be happy? What would it take to create a world where all people would be loved equally and all people would have equal opportunity for food and a safe place to live? These questions are not easily answered but they do need to be asked, and in compelling fashion, Michael Cunningham is doing just that.

Fine writing, incredibly beautiful imagery, and some provocative ideas make for an excellent read by the talented Cunningham. Enjoy.

Shelley Brown is with Richmond Public Library. For other reading suggestions see www.yourlibrary.ca/goodbooks.