Customer Reviews

Specimen Days: A Novel

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I fell in love with Michael Cunningham's writing with his spectacular opus, "The Hours." I continue to love his style and voice in his latest, "Specimen Days."

Each scene's crispness of style and beautiful eloquence kept me enthralled from the first page to the last. The masterful usage of Whitman's own poetic talent profoundly adds to the novel as a whole and never detracts from Cunningham's own powerful and unique voice throughout his narratives.

I was particularly fond of the novellas "Like Beauty" and "The Children's Crusade." I found these two stories to be of considerable importance to our lives and I reread them both for their deep message and artistic voice.

The clever and imaginative style combined with a painter's eye for imagery makes it as memorable as the Hours and it absolutely stands on its own as a fantastically accomplished feat. There are few authors who can tap into true creativity these days like Cunningham can and any fan of his work should be quite satisfied with his latest!

Can't wait for more! I also highly recommended the exceptionally beautiful novel, "Anna's Trinity" by Howard Cobiskey

Michael Cunningham has proven himself to be one of today's finest writers. From his stunning comprehensive book "Flesh and Blood" to what I believe one of the best books ever written, "The Hours", Cunningham's great literary gift is his careful use of words; i.e. making the words work for him, instead of he working for the words. Such is the case with his latest book, "Specimen Days", just recently released.

A compendium of three stories, like the Hours, Specimen Days tells three separate stories in three separate times, and like the Hours, they are interconnected. The first story is one of an industrailized New York, where machinery rules, and a young boy copes with life and death, and his infinite knowledge of Walt Whitman. The second story takes place in modern New York, as a black psychologist deals with terrorism in today's age. The third story zips along to a futuristic New York, with a trio of futuristic entities as they make their way through this world.

Whereas the Hours has clear and amazing connections, the reader must work more for the connections in this book, however, they are there. The most obvious one is Cunningham's use of essentially the same three characters in each story, continuining along with their own stories, There are more subtle and rich connections, and they are worth the discovery.

However, the thing I am most impressed about with this book is Cunningham's writing. There is a scene in the first story that exemplifies his writing style, and the beauty of his words. Lucas, a deformed adolscent, is sent on a mini-quest by none other than Walt Whitman, and Lucas finds himself in Central Park at the Bethesda fountain. As Lucas peers beyond the angels hands, he sees the impressive starlight, never having seen it before. The scene was so moving, with each word chosen exactly right, that I read it over and over again, to relive the experience created by Cunningham. For that alone, this book is worth the journey.

It may be another few years before we get treated to another Cunningham book, but let me tell you, it is definitely worth the wait.

Following publication of his paean to universality, LEAVES OF GRASS, Walt Whitman spent much of his Civil War years as a nurse in the war hospitals around Washington, D.C. His experiences dealing with the human ruination visited by war upon ordinary souls led to two great but lesser known works, a book of poetry entitled DRUM TAPS ("O Captain, My Captain") and a collection of essays about the horrors of war published in 1882 under the title SPECIMEN DAYS. Michael Cunningham's SPECIMEN DAYS draws not only its title but its thematic soul from Whitman. Rather than the Civil War, however, Cunningham focuses on humanity's war against itself and the planet on which we live. His is a story of terrorism told in three parts, beginning with industrial terrorism, moving to post-9/11 acts of random terrorism, and ending with a futuristic parable of ecological and religious terrorism.

The first section of SPECIMEN DAYS is entitled "In the Machine." The main character, Simon, has just died, literally eaten by a metal stamping machine in a factory referred to as "the works," a Dickensian horror chamber of industrial mindlessness. Simon's betrothed, Catherine, works as a seamstress, sewing sleeves to bodices at a dress company named Mannahatta. Simon's birth-deformed, 12-year-old brother, Lucas, takes Simon's place in the same factory, on the same machine. Lucas's belief that he can hear his dead brother's voice in the machine leads him to a seemingly demented act that saves Catherine's life.

In the second section, titled "The Children's Crusade," Catherine becomes Cat, a 30-ish black woman trained as a psychologist, all intuitions and hunches. Cat works for the police department, taking hot line calls of would-be bombers and deciding which ones to take seriously. Simon becomes her younger, white, MBA futures trader, the very soul of analytical reason. Cat's tragic mistake in judgment on a child's call leads her to connect with "the family," a loose network of child terrorists seeking to reconnect urban Americans to rural life and Nature. Lucas appears as another deformed young boy, this one a terrorist whose mission has only just begun when he meets Cat.

In the futuristic final section, "Like Beauty," Catherine is Catareen, a four-foot tall, female lizard-alien from the planet Nadia. Most of the north and northeastern U.S. is now uninhabitable as a result of "the meltdown," radical Christian factions have apparently seized control of the government, and New York City has become a gigantic theme park. Simon is an android actor, stationed in Central Park as a mugger and programmed to thrill Eurasian tourists with the dangerous nostalgia of "Old New York." A most unlikely pair, Catareen and Simon set out for Denver on a mythic quest, where they meet the deformed boy Lucas and their respective fates.

Walt Whitman infuses Cunningham's stories like a spiritual force, even making a personal appearance in the first section as he guides young Lucas to his first vision of the stars over the Angel of the Waters Fountain in Central Park's Bethesda Terrace. More than just having characters who almost uncontrollably utter lines from LEAVES OF GRASS (as a result of psychological defect, brainwashing, and finally, a faulty "poetry chip"), Cunningham makes Whitman's, "Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" an insistent refrain. Freedom to live a natural life, to live in Nature instead of simply dominating and corrupting it, is Cunningham's recurring theme. Small Whitmanisms flicker through the text - Mannahatta, the name of the dress company in the first story, is the title of one "chapter" of LEAVES OF GRASS. Cunningham also plays on Whitman's sense of earthly and cosmic oneness by using the name Gaya in all three sections, an obvious homonym for the Earth Goddess Gaia and the so-called Gaia Hypothesis of the Earth as itself a living, breathing organism.

SPECIMEN DAYS is a great literary read, at once an historical novel, a contemplation of post-9/11 America, and a futuristic science fantasy. It is a book you will not want to put down until you've finished it. Familiarity with Walt Whitman's work is not necessary, but reading this book will surely convey Whitman's illimitable sense of wonder at life's interconnectedness and his belief in the eternal continuity of all things. What better weapon with which to combat industrial, ecological, and religious terrorism than such exuberant passion for life and for our eternal place among the stars?

Considering that July 2005 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass," it is only fitting that Michael Cunningham's impressive new novel "Specimen Days" celebrates the work of Whitman.

Set in New York City, "Specimen Days" is a marvel of construction and execution. The plots compliment each other with recurring character names and reference to places and objects, while utilizing Whitman's poetry as a unifying motif. With skill and insight Cunningham has captured three separate genres - a ghost story set in the 1880's, a modern day story of suspense, and an allegorical science fiction tale set 150 years in the future. Along the way there are passages of great beauty. Indeed, the scene where a disfigured boy encounters Whitman on a Manhattan street is one of the most rapturous in contemporary literature. This is truly bravura writing.

It is difficult for an artist to follow a work generally regarded as a masterpiece, and though this work does feature three connected stories in in different time periods, that is where all comparisons with "The Hours" should begin and end. "Specimen Days" may not prove to be a masterwork, but it is an inspired and rewarding piece of fiction, and deserves to be appreciated for its own virtues which are many.

Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days is the most disappointing book I've read this year. It simply doesn't live up to its own promise. What starts out so well written and thematically rich, gets lost, seems to bog down and flounders at last to a desperate and irresolute conclusion. Cunningham sets himself a difficult task by trying to structure Specimen Days like his previous novel, The Hours, with its three different tales set in three different historical periods with the common denominator being the work of a single towering literary figure, in this case Walt Whitman. Such a constraining strategy risks coming off as gimmicky if Cunningham doesn't deliver the goods, but early in the book it looks like he is going to rise to the challenge, saying something profound about our view of terrorism post-9/11. But then he abandons that trajectory and serves up a weird science fiction tale instead, one which owes more to Stephen King's The Dead Zone then to anything preceding it in this book.

It appears Cunningham loses his nerve. What he seems to be flirting with saying, halfway through the second story in Specimen Days - a story set in present day New York in which the heroine has to cope with a group of suicide bombers who are children - is that we owe it to ourselves to try to understand the people who are trying to kill us, that terrorists, too, are human beings, and that denying their humanity and simply trying to exterminate them may not be the best long term solution to the problem. This idea bubbles near the surface when Cat, the heroine, attempts to disarm a child who is carrying a bomb and may set it off at any moment, killing them both: "Cat was seized by a spasm of dreadful compassion. Here was a monster; here was a frightened child. Here was a tortured little boy who could at any moment blow them both away."

I found myself saying "hooray!" ready to give Cunningham high marks for taking on such a controversial (and yet ultimately constructive) view of things in the current political climate. He gets at the theme in several other places as well, so the implication is not strictly circumstantial. But then Cunningham drops the hot potato and backs away. All the ingredients are in place, particularly with reference to the first story, set in late nineteenth century New York, in which a soulful child goes to work in a sweatshop and is dehumanized by his relationship with a mechanized world. Cunningham had something cooking here and after finishing the first two stories I was eager to embark on the third. What a let-down! I would've been more satisfied to see Specimen Days end after the second story. It would've been better than what Cunningham serves up.

I have no objection to science fiction per se and I firmly believe Cunningham could've inserted a science fiction tale as the last piece in the triptych and made it work. He is a talented writer and can do many things, but this story is so weirdly out there, with its lizard people and semi-robots and a phallic silver space ship with fins like something off the cover of a 1950's copy of Analog Science Fact and Fiction, it's just too jarring. Imagine switching channels from PBS to HBO to The Cartoon Channel and you get the idea. To make matters worse, Cunningham seems desperately anxious to tie this story thematically to other stories without any clear idea of how. Ultimately, the story feels labored, juvenile and clichéd. I couldn't help but sense that he intended going somewhere else with Specimen Days and lost his nerve or was discouraged from going there and ended up tacking on this listless experiment with Science Fiction instead.

I hope it's not true. I admire Cunningham's talent and would hate to think he compromised so cravenly. On the other hand, if Specimen Days doesn't represent an eleventh hour bail and is truly the new standard by which we are to measure his ability, I'm terribly disappointed as well.

Over the years, I've been following Mr. Cunningham's writing with interest and pleasure. Flesh and Blood and a Home at the End of the World are compelling, very moving works of fiction. The Hours has many felicities too, but on the other hand already show traces of the problems that make Specimen Days, in my view, so unsatisfying: both, in a way, wear their skeletons on the outside. The narrative and metaphoric construction of Specimen Days, especially, is so obviously contrived that it draws attention away from the storytelling itself. Worse, as you go along the storylines seem more and more random; as if the guiding structure could have been filled in in many different ways, too, without making much difference to the final result.
Specimen Days in fact consists of three separate novellas, in which similar characters, situations, and symbols recur in different contexts. They share the theme of people going through a traumatic experience that leads them to break away from their settled routines. The pantheistic visions of Walt Whitman are offered as a philosophical framework, but unfortunately remain a 'Fremdkörper' throughout. Of the three stories, I found the first one the most convincing. It has a peculiar, gloomy atmosphere, tinged with surrealism, that is fascinating in a way, though it precludes any sense of real contact with the characters. In a 19th century setting, the boy Lukas goes to work in the factory where his brother was killed a week ago, in fact operating the same machine that Lukas now has to work with. The boy becomes convinced that his brother's ghost is in the machine, and in other machines, too. Eventually his visions drive him to a desperately heroic act to save the life of his brother's fiancee, Catherine. In the second novella, we again meet Catharine, now a black police psychologist in the 20th century. She is probably the most recognizable person in the book for most readers. The story in which she appears will appeal to CSI-audiences and readers of crime novels. It is thrilling in its way, but also rather thin. The pivotal twist in the plot occurs rather sudden and is unconvincing from a psychological point of view.
However, no matter what one thinks of the first two novellas, they are absolute masterpieces compared to the embarrassing concluding story, 'Like Beauty'. At first I took it this sci-fi pastiche was an elaborate and not particularly funny joke, but as I went along I started to fear the author actually meant for us to take it seriously. In this Pinoccio-meets-Star Trek spoof, Catharine has turned into Catareen, a small, lizard-like, and yes: green, alien. As a refugee from the planet Nadia she's now a nanny for some rich NYC family, two centuries from now. She meets the half-robot Simon, who's an actor in New York, which has been turned into a theme-park where people get mugged on (their own) demand. Together, they set off to give their lives a new direction. It is too wearisome even to summarize the ludicrous plot. The text is sprinkled with little finds that the author probably though quite amusing, but in fact often detract from its believability. (The kids that Catareen takes care of are called Tomcruise and Katemoss, which is just about as likely as twentieth century kids being called Lordbyron and Janeausten.) Disperate elements are strung together willy-nilly to infuse an impression of higher meaning - even the strangely luminous bowl from the previous two stories finds its way into this one.
But mere collage of a handful of idées-fixes does not by itself make a good work of literature. I was also increasingly irritated by the author's far-fetched metaphors. ("...her face was vague, as if someone had drawn the features of a woman on the front of her head and then tried to erase them." I don't know how long the author took to come up with that one, but you have only to try and envision it to find that it is utter nonsense).
I finished Specimen Days with a sense of great disappointment and of time (and money) wasted. From a recent interview I gathered Cunningham is planning to go even further down this path in his future work. If he does, he has lost this reader.

In this novel, actually three intertwined stories, Michael Cunningham sets a different tone for each, according to the timing in past, present and future New York, respectively. Each story is breathtaking in its own way. The first one, dating from the Industrial Revolution, is off to a somewhat awkward start, but captures you very soon and makes your heart ache; the second one sounds a little thrillery-trashy, and the last one, sci-fi, could be located somewhere between "1984" and "E.T.".

Cunningham displays to the fullest his knack for pointed facets of human feelings in just a side-sentence or two, which is all the more remarkable since the prevailing subjects in each chapter are non-human, namely machines. The humans all have some sort of flaw, be it the physical deformation of the Lucas/Lukes (counterweighed by a precocious depth of spirit, as it may be assumed with teenagers conversing in Walt Whitman-phrases), lack of character of the Simons, or social incompatibilities of the Catherines. But like lost souls on the eternal quest for happiness and love, they are magnetically drawn to one another. A beautiful symbol that connects the characters throughout the entire book is a shiny white bowl, passed on from one low-life merchant to another. By hinting that, unbeknownst to the buyers and sellers, it may be immeasurably precious, but never revealing if and why nor the fate of the bowl, Cunningham leaves us wondering about the concepts of value, luck and misfortune in general.

The novel could be read as a prophetic warning, decrying social injustice and general misery caused by inventions meant to be helpful, but Cunningham accomplishes more than that. He goes full circle in showing that there really is no beginning and no end; the outcasts in the sci-fi chapter departing to another planet to seek their fortune don't seem much different from the first settlers populating the Wild West or America altogether, for that matter. In doing so, he puts our fear of our transience in perspective. A different and brilliant read.

Specimen Days is a very quick and reasonably entertaining read. The book is broken up into 3 sort-of-connected sections, each one set further into the future than the prior. The first section is a beautiful, marvellously written piece. The true greatness of Michael Cunningham shines brilliantly in those first 93 pages. The second piece grows on you and isn't by any means horrible, but it just pales in comparison to the first. The Whitman references and connections to the first story seem a bit cheesy and thin. Again, not terrible, but simply unspectacular. The third segment, well, it's just really hard to swallow. It's basically pretty lousy science fiction. The scenario is undoubtedly artistic, but as a whole, it had me tortured as I plowed through it hoping for it to end. There is certainly a deeper context of empathy and regret that has an emotionally satisfying element to it, but the story and character personalities are quite stale. Too bad. As I was enjoying the first piece I was thinking how it had the potential to be a really wonderful book, however like the dandellion on the front cover, the greatness sort of went away.

"The Hours", probably the most renowned book written by Michael Cunningham, was haunted by the presence of Virginia Woof. Besides being one of the characters in the three stories in this book, she was a sort of common thread connecting its plot: her lost battle against madness and melancholy was relived in a second story (taking place in the early fifties) about the troubled American housewife and in a first and more contemporary story about a depressed poet infected with AIDS, who turns out to be her son.
Michael Cunningham's most recent book - "Specimen days" - consists of three stories again: "In the machine" takes place in the 19th century, in the dawn of the Industrial Age; the second is a modern-day story - "The children's crusade" - depicting the aftermath of September 11 and a new wave of terrorism; "Like beauty", which sounds like a sci-fi story, happens in a distant future and in a wasted world. In Specimen days, there is a writer as a sort of intertextual reference. But, differently from "The hours", this writer is no longer a character in one of the stories. It is his style, his subject and even the soul of his writings that cuts across the whole structure of the book. But even when we identify Walt Whitman as this writer, we must be aware that the Whitman rebuild by Cunningham is not exactly the same poet celebrated by his patriotism and his pride of the greatness of North America. The Whitman in Specimen days, although he keeps his style and his voice, is a Whitman turned inside out by Cunningham along the three stories of his latest book.
The United States remains a great and powerful nation, but "Specimen days" shows us how their greatness is founded on poverty, segregation and destruction. In this context, if America for Whitman was destined to reinvent the world and be a sort of emancipator of the human soul, the three stories of "Specimen days" show us how this project of freedom has failed. One of the most beautiful and touching passages in which we can find this Whitman turned inside out is in the second story of Cunningham's latest book when a woman who breeds terrorist children justifies her actions:

"Look around. Do you see happiness? Do you see joy? Americans have never been this prosperous, people have never been this safe, They've never lived so long, in such good health, ever, in the whole of history. To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself... And look at us. We're so obese we need bigger cemetery plots. Our ten-year-olds are doing heroin, or they are murdering eight-years-olds, or both... We're bombing other countries simply because they make us nervous, and most of us not only couldn't find those countries on a map, we couldn't tell you which continent they're on. Traces of the fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turns up in women's breast milk. So, tell me. Would you say this is working out? Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?" (p. 171).


The recent past mentioned here is the time when the first story of "Specimen days" occurs and Walt Whitman's time as well. The wonders of a new world chanted by this American poet are very different from the sad realities of today's world, which, in spite of all the progress conquered along a century, became worse and worse. And if we consider that the third story of "Specimen days" happens far beyond our time and in a completely destroyed world, we realize that the future imagined by Whitman will be less and less possible.
Nevertheless, when Cunningham plays Whitman against Whitman it is not to criticize this controversial poet or even his vision of America. It is to show us that if Americans want to deserve the greatness chanted by Whitman, they must change their way of life, their way of seeing American progress and they must cooperate with their partners and even their enemies. Without these changes, it is not Whitman's poetry that is romantic, naïve or even false, but it is North America that, in spite of its power, reveals how fragile a strong nation can be.
Some critics have argued that Specimen days is not as good as the other books written by Michael Cunningham. In my opinion, it is a fact that the first two stories of this book are better than the third one; and "Specimen days" looks more fragmented than "The hours" or even "Flesh and blood" or "A home at the end of the world". But, if we take our puzzling times and the power of Whitman's words into consideration, it is the most impressive book written by Cunningham so far.

Specimen Days is not only the title of Cunningham's book, it is also the title of a work by Walt Whitman, the poet whose observations were apparently the inspiration for Cunningham's latest tome.

Less a novel, and more a series of three thematically connected novellas that relates each tale via different literary genres (19th century ghost story, late 20th century crime thriller, and 22nd century sci-fi love story). New York City is the backdrop for each chronicle and similarly named characters make their appearance in each.

The choreography for the presentation is provided through the observations of Whitman and each of Cunningham's stories seems to be a commentary of sorts on past and present political, cultural and social conditions.

The ambiguity at the end of each story presents the reader with various choices. It's up to you to choose optimism, pessimism, or perhaps a little ambivalence.

This book seems to reinforce Yogi Berra's famous quote: "It's deja vu all over again!!