In Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours, three central characters in three different historical periods ponder the same book: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. In Cunningham's new novel, Specimen Days, three central characters in three different historical periods ponder the same book: Walt Whitman's Leaves Of Grass. In The Hours, Woolf makes an appearance. In Specimen Days, Whitman shows up. Had he not already written two previous novels in different molds, this Cunningham fellow would risk a reputation as a one-trick pony,
But oh, what a trick it is. Cunningham seems to have invented his own literary form, and in Specimen Days, he crafts it with a master's assurance. The Hours' slim silhouette and spare melancholy give way to the larger, more desolate landscape of New York City. "In The Machine," set in the late 19th century, introduces a mentally deficient boy who has to take his brother's factory job after a mechanical accident. Sometimes when he opens his mouth to speak, Whitman's words come out instead of his own. "The Children's Crusade" jumps to post-9/11. A policewoman on the threat hotline realizes that, amid all the cranks and psychos, she's spoken to a real bomber—a boy who, shortly after calling her, hugged a complete stranger and detonated. While the cops hunt for the "brothers" he mentioned in his call, she wonders whether the fragments of Whitman's poetry he quoted provide any clues. "Like Beauty" takes place in the next century, after nuclear meltdowns have rendered much of the East Coast radioactive and New York has become a down-market Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. After the "biologicals" outlaw his kind, a Whitman-spouting re-enactor android flees the city, persuading another social outcast, an alien nanny, to join him. Together, they travel toward Denver, where according to the android's programming, something big is due to happen on June 21.
The walls between temporal dimensions are thin in Specimen Days. Names and phrases echo as if the three novellas were connected chambers in a vast underground cavern. Yet Cunningham achieves the same intimacy in this large work as he did in The Hours, fitting worlds of meaning into an unspoken thought. His characters—male and female, children and adults, human, mechanical, and alien—all sing Whitman's great songs of America's virile beauty. From them, Cunningham synthesizes his own theme: Death, if approached without fear, unleashes a wild, spiritual energy that can give birth to a new age, or simply destroy an old one. With skill and courage, he explores the ends to which death can be a means, in a great American novel for the terrorism age.