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Specimen Days
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Lucas, Catherine, Simon: three characters meet time and again in the three linked narratives that form ‘Specimen Days’. The first, a science fiction of the past, tells of a boy whose brother was ‘devoured’ by the machine he operated. The second is a noirish thriller set in our century, as a police psychologist attempts to track down a group of terrorists. And the third and final strand accompanies two strange beings into the future.
A novel of connecting and reconnecting, inspired by the writings of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman, Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting ode to life itself – a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today
A novel of connecting and reconnecting, inspired by the writings of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman, Specimen Days is a genre-bending, haunting ode to life itself – a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1,2005
This edition
- Format
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336 pages, Paperback
- Published
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April 18, 2006 by Picador
- ISBN
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9780312425029
- ASIN
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0312425023
- Language
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English
About the author
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Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the non-fiction book, Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. His new novel, The Snow Queen, will be published in May of 2014. He lives in New York, and teaches at Yale University.
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On the front cover of my edition of this book it says "A Novel" after the title. It's really three novellas or very long short stories which are connected by several elements. One is the poetry of Walt Whitman, the second is a mysterious white dish, the third is repeated characters in different iterations.
Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. As I read this book, I was aware of its accomplished writing. But I never understood why, other than that perhaps Cunningham is a huge Walt Whitman fan, that this type of thread persisted. It felt like a clunky insertion and a choice that interrupted the storytelling. I'm sure there's deep meaning in the quotes; the specific quotes were most likely chosen to show those meanings. Sometimes I got it, but mostly they took me out of the flow. In the first and last story, in which the poetry quotes get delivered as dialogue, the characters don't even like that they sputter out poetry. It's something they can't control. In the first story, it's Lucas that has this affliction. His big crush, Catherine, an older woman who was engaged to Lucas's dead brother Simon, is extremely patient with Lucas's affliction. Eventually, even she becomes exasperated with it. In the third story, the character who spouts poetry is an android named Simon. He keeps saying he hates it, doesn't know why he does it. When he finds out that his creator, Emory Lowell, did it on purpose, he asks Emory why. Emory says, (p. 280) "Everybody loves poetry." I nearly laughed aloud. No, not everybody.
The white bowl never quite makes it as a specific connective symbol. It's purpose is only to reappear in each story. In the first story, Lucas buys it for Catherine. In the second story, "Cat" buys it for her boyfriend. In the third story, Luke, a boy Simon and Catareen the Nadian meet, buys it back from a street woman, saying it's something he remembers his mother having. Each time, someone notices its value. It has a mysterious glow. That's it.
The two stories told as genre fiction, one as detective thriller, the other as science fiction, bear all the tropes. Cat, the detective, has a broken past. The science fiction has made up words inserted too many times and hoverpods. It starts with a kind of West World premise. I got to thinking, what would these be like without the insertion of all that poetry? I concluded they wouldn't be all that special. The first story is the best. It is historical fiction, but it felt like the one that rose above all these connective elements and its genre to become something unique.
This book was a disappointment for me, but I know others thought it was terrific.
Michael Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999. As I read this book, I was aware of its accomplished writing. But I never understood why, other than that perhaps Cunningham is a huge Walt Whitman fan, that this type of thread persisted. It felt like a clunky insertion and a choice that interrupted the storytelling. I'm sure there's deep meaning in the quotes; the specific quotes were most likely chosen to show those meanings. Sometimes I got it, but mostly they took me out of the flow. In the first and last story, in which the poetry quotes get delivered as dialogue, the characters don't even like that they sputter out poetry. It's something they can't control. In the first story, it's Lucas that has this affliction. His big crush, Catherine, an older woman who was engaged to Lucas's dead brother Simon, is extremely patient with Lucas's affliction. Eventually, even she becomes exasperated with it. In the third story, the character who spouts poetry is an android named Simon. He keeps saying he hates it, doesn't know why he does it. When he finds out that his creator, Emory Lowell, did it on purpose, he asks Emory why. Emory says, (p. 280) "Everybody loves poetry." I nearly laughed aloud. No, not everybody.
The white bowl never quite makes it as a specific connective symbol. It's purpose is only to reappear in each story. In the first story, Lucas buys it for Catherine. In the second story, "Cat" buys it for her boyfriend. In the third story, Luke, a boy Simon and Catareen the Nadian meet, buys it back from a street woman, saying it's something he remembers his mother having. Each time, someone notices its value. It has a mysterious glow. That's it.
The two stories told as genre fiction, one as detective thriller, the other as science fiction, bear all the tropes. Cat, the detective, has a broken past. The science fiction has made up words inserted too many times and hoverpods. It starts with a kind of West World premise. I got to thinking, what would these be like without the insertion of all that poetry? I concluded they wouldn't be all that special. The first story is the best. It is historical fiction, but it felt like the one that rose above all these connective elements and its genre to become something unique.
This book was a disappointment for me, but I know others thought it was terrific.
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I wonder if Michael Cunningham had a rigorous religious education, since he seems most inspired by trinities -- the three generations in "Flesh and Blood," the three suicidal lesbians in "The Hours," the past, present and future of New York City in "Specimen Days." His other great muse is, well, the idea of muse, thus "Specimen Days" consists of three parallel novellas imbued with allusions to Walt Whitman. How clever or appropriate these references are, I can't tell, I've never read much of him since he's always struck me as a bit manic and self-important, but now memorizing the last edition of "Leaves of Grass" seems like some kind of moral imperative to me. Yes, "Specimen Days" is that good. The first story, "In the Machine," is a poetically grim bit of magic realism that is merely hypnotic in comparison to the second piece, "The Children's Crusade," which is probably the best thriller I've ever read until the last ten or so pages, when it turns mystical. The last story, "Like Beauty," is a bit of dystopian science fiction that will feel pleasantly familiar to fans of McCarthy's "The Road" and Saunders' "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" and annoyingly familiar to people like me who hate the two-page expository monologues common to bad scifi and fantasy novels and sadly present in this otherwise exquisite novel. But Cunningham is probably the best prose stylist in the English language, so I'll give him the benefit of a doubt that he might be parodic in intent since it's surrounded by some typically lovely passages. Anyway, brilliant, competes with "The Hours" for his best.
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Another incredible title by Cunningham. The book consists of three narratives—one in the past, one in the present, and one in the future—and is set in New York. The stories themselves are each very well done, but the themes of Walt Whitman’s work are what ties them together and makes the book so powerful. I’m no Whitman expert, but to me this book was very much about death, the promise of rebirth/transformation, and the beauty that lies therein. And that extends beyond a single individual, to a people, a nation, a planet. Cunningham isn’t afraid of getting gritty or exploring suffering, and he does so quite generously here, but there are moments throughout, like the sun briefly emerging from a cloudy sky, that let you know suffering is not all there is. There is so much more… the sun was always there, the clouds just obscured it for a time.
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Just awful. How could the author of The Hours and Flesh and Blood think this pile of crap was a good idea? It actually made me angry to read it, and I apologize to my book group for putting them through it.
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this was recommended to me by my sister as we were discussing walt whitman one day. also,she and i both loved michael cunningham's 'the hours.'
michael cunningham writes so beautifully. this is really three somewhat connected stories,or a novel split in three parts...however you want to see it. i love books with a lot of description,and especially in the first story,this covers it. these stories are a bit disturbing but also make you think in a good way,and i read very quickly as i really enjoyed being in the experience of reading this.
there isn't really a lot specificly about whitman in this book,in spite of the title,which comes from a nonfiction book by whitman. but the sensibility is a connection,if you can understand what i mean.
michael cunningham writes so beautifully. this is really three somewhat connected stories,or a novel split in three parts...however you want to see it. i love books with a lot of description,and especially in the first story,this covers it. these stories are a bit disturbing but also make you think in a good way,and i read very quickly as i really enjoyed being in the experience of reading this.
there isn't really a lot specificly about whitman in this book,in spite of the title,which comes from a nonfiction book by whitman. but the sensibility is a connection,if you can understand what i mean.
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Okay, Cunningham can write, sure: he has stylistic skills, knows how to portray plausible characters and composes interesting stories with them, often with literary references (cf. The Hours and Virginia Woolf). He also shows this in this book, which consists of three parts. The first has a quite explicit Dickensian slant, the second is in line with the best psychological thrillers, and the third with the most fascinating material from dystopian science fiction. Cunningham up to a point connects the three stories, although they take place in three different time periods: silly links such as a bowl that suddenly appears in each of the stories (it is not clear to me why), intriguing ones such as names of characters that return (Simon, Luke, Catherine), and the like. At the beginning of the book, Cunningham included a quote from Walt Whitman, the personification of exuberant American individualism, which hints that people always struggle with the same feelings regardless of new times. Is this the unifying theme? Perhaps. By the way, Whitman constantly returns in the stories, almost always in the form of quotes, turning him into a gimmick. Did Cunningham want to illustrate with this book that time and place don't matter in human lifes, and that everyone (even a ‘humanized robot’) actually just wants the same thing: a bit of security and happiness? At the risk of sounding harsh: isn’t that a bit cheesy? I don't know, this novel didn't convince me.
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As a great fan of Walt Whitman, I found this book fascinating and enjoyed revisiting the Good Gray Poet. The writing is elegant and engaging throughout and while there's an undeniable tension due to the ongoing thread of violence and suspense, it was a provocative and intriguing read. My rating should really be five stars for quality and four stars for personal enjoyment; I admit that futuristic writing isn't my favorite genre (of course, this is only one third of the book), but Cunningham's projection was quite compelling nonetheless.
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