Specimen Days: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: atom belonging, good belongs, Dick Harte, New Jersey, Leaves of Grass (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Book Description: In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around the city. The third part, "Like Beauty," evokes a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.

Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised his future readers, "It avails not, neither time or place ... I am with you, and know how it is." Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest city and a meditation on the direction and meaning of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.

More from Michael Cunningham

The Hours	A Home at the End of the World	Flesh and Blood

Whitman Sampler

The Portable Walt Whitman	Specimen Days & Collect	Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose

Whitman Sampler

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Engaging Walt Whitman as his muse (and borrowing the name of Whitman's 1882 autobiography for his title), Cunningham weaves a captivating, strange and extravagant novel of human progress and social decline. Like his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hours, the novel tells three stories separated in time. But here, the stage is the same (the "glittering, blighted" city of Manhattan), the actors mirror each other (a deformed, Whitman-quoting boy, Luke, is a terrorist in one story and a teenage prophet in another; a world-weary woman, Catherine, is a would-be bride and an alien; and a handsome young man, Simon, is a ghost, a business man and an artificial human) and weighty themes (of love and fear, loss and connection, violence and poetry) reverberate with increasing power. "In the Machine," set during the Industrial Revolution, tells the story of 12-year-old Luke as he falls in love with his dead brother's girlfriend, Catherine, and becomes convinced that the ghost of his brother, Simon, lives inside the iron works machine that killed him. The suspenseful "The Children's Crusade" explores love and maternal instinct via a thrilleresque plot, as Cat, a black forensic psychologist, draws away from her rich, white and younger lover, Simon, and toward a spooky, deformed boy who's also a member of a global network committed to random acts of terror. And in "Like Beauty," Simon, a "simulo"; Catareen, a lizard-like alien; and Luke, an adolescent prophet, strike out for a new life in a postapocalyptic world. With its narrative leaps and self-conscious flights into the transcendent, Cunningham's fourth novel sometimes seems ready to collapse under the weight of its lavishness and ambition—but thrillingly, it never does. This is daring, memorable fiction.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (June 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374299625
• ISBN-13: 978-0374299620
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (94 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #432,420 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Voice of Cunningham Continues!, July 16, 2005

By	IngenueHeart - See all my reviews

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

123 of 137 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Living Walt, June 10, 2005

By	James Hiller (Beaverton, OR) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Magnificent Adaptation of Whitman to Modern American Life, June 12, 2005

By	Steve Koss (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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?