Book Review: Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

“Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you,

I candidly confess a queer, queer race, of novel fashion,
And yet the same old human race, the same within, without,
Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearning the same,
The same old love, beauty and use the same.”
 (Walt Whitman)

The first few lines in Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham’s latest literary outing prove his love for Walt Whitman’s poetry. He established his mastery with words and secondary sources with the poignantly interwoven The Hours, which deftly wove the literary air of another masterpiece, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to create a tragic and symbolic narrative that hardly left any reader unaffected. His follow up novel, Specimen Days, generously borrows from Whitman’s epochal work, The Leaves of Grass, like The Hours. Writing three parallel stories with obtuse similarities and common themes of redemption, guilt, escape and hope, Cunningham goes inventive and innovative as he dabbles in drama, crime noir and science fiction in the stories entitled In the Machine, The Children’s Crusade and Like Beauty, respectively.

Characters

Cunningham paints three characters, Simon, Catherine and Lucas, in three different times and spaces. Barring a few common characteristics, and phonetically similar names, the three characters seem totally different in all the three stories. In In the Machine, Simon is a beautiful young boy who dies in an industrial accident, Catherine is his beautiful fiancée grieving over his loss and Lucas is his deformed brother wrestling with this tragedy. The Children’s Crusade sees Cat is an NYPD officer, Simon, her businessman partner and Luke, a child terrorist. Finally in Like Beauty, Simon is an outlaw male cyborg, Catareen, an alien lizard, and Luke, a homeless boy.

A strain of tragedy runs through all the characters. The three characters take turns in assuming primary importance, with Lucas, Cat and Simon headlining the narratives in In the Machine, The Children’s Crusade and Like Beauty, respectively.

Comparisons with The Hours are inevitable...

Plot

In the Machine: This story, set during the 1870’s Industrial revolution deals with struggles with ghosts of the past, and fears of the unknown, symbolic of the fear of the machine age. The story speaks of how Lucas and Catherine finally free themselves of the dreadful emotional clutches of Simon’s death and find comfort within each other.

The Children’s Crusade: Easily the most engaging of the lot, the plot sees Cat, in post 9/11 jittery New York, trying to solve the mystery of a terrorist outfit that uses children as suicide bombers and her dissolving relationship with Simon, her boyfriend, due to her obsession with the case as well as Luke, one of the child terrorists.

Like Beauty: Partly allusive, partly innovative and partly unintelligible, this story speaks of Simon, a male cyborg in who is in love with another male cyborg, Marcus but also develops feelings for Catareen, an alien humanoid lizard, who gets killed due to her attachment to a human child, Luke.

Style

               

One thing that is commendable about Cunningham is his unique literary style. He characterises his works with an obsession with the number 3, a deliberate borrowing from another literary source and a morbid fascination for death. His plain prose interspersed with complex Whitman poetry creates the perfect contrast of styles. He paints the characters in a way that the circumstances take precedence over them and their actions. There are distinct underlying themes of death, escape, and redemption, in rather morose form. Even the redemptions are left unclear, rather like Richard Yates’ novels. Dark, brooding and eloquent, this novel pushes Cunningham’s legacy forward.

Whitman's effect looms heavily over the fatalistic narrative...

The Flaws

·          Arguably lacking the clarity and lucidity of The Hours, this novel feels a little too taxing on the brains due to its convoluted and complex plot, especially in Like Beauty.

·         Many will be hard-pressed to find similarities among the three novellas.

·         Clearly not meant for everyone, the morbid themes can repel a lot of readers.

·         The ambiguity, though a literary tool used to great effect in the stories, may leave too many unanswered questions for some readers.

·         While The Hours grappled with death, a well-defined fact, Specimen Days deals with desires of escape and achieving more than mere survival, decidedly more abstract concepts.

·         Like his previous outings, this one too is written for a niche readership.

Pulitzer Winner Cunningham creates yet another thought-provoker...

The Praise

·         None of Cunningham’s contemporaries know how to weave secondary sources as deftly as Cunningham does. The way he entwines Whitman’s poetry and his philosophies on life and death is masterful in the least.

·         The characters, though not very deep work like furniture against symbolic palettes of the times and circumstances. The situations are the source of all action, not the characters and this approach, if consciously examined, brings logic.

·         The language treads the fine balance of articulate and beautiful.

·          In a bravura move to experiment with genres as well as styles, Cunningham shines through.