I am not sure why this book ended up on the remaindered shelf, where I bought it. The stories are a cross-between science and speculative fiction, with the spectre of Walt Whitman playing scorekeeper to mankind's foibles. Excellently crafted.

American writer who is more known for 1988's Pulitzer awardee for Fiction The Hours, Michael Cummingham (born 1952) first published this book, The Specimen Days in 2005. If The Hours is based on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, The Specimen Days is based on the Walt Whitman's complete collection of poetry and collected prose bearing the same title.

If there is an award for the most organized and ambitious structure for a trilogy, it has to be this Cunningham work. The reason is that this book is divided into 3 parts. Each part has its own 3 characters (a man, a woman and a boy), its own setting and time and its own genre:

Part I - In The Machine: Simon, Catherine, Lucas - Past: Industrial Revolution - horror
Part II - The Children's Crusade: Simon, Cat, Luke - Present: 20th century - noir thriller
Part III - Like Beauty: Simon, Catareen, Luke - Future: 150 years from now - science fiction

What these 3 stories have in common:
1) All set in New York (but at different periods of time)
2) They all have Walt Whitman either as a character or the lines in his Leaves of Grass are read or become basis of the story
3) There are only 3 main characters: a man, a woman and a boy but they may or may not be related to each other.

Each story can stand on its own. Although I am not really fond of the three genres, I liked the first one better because of the way the scare was handled. I just cannot associate ghost with machines but it helped when if I imagined how people during the Industrial Revolution probably felt about machines taking over their jobs. Also, prior to this book, I had no idea who Walt Whitman was but I understand that he was suspected to be gay and based on Wiki, Michael Cunningham (who is openly gay to but he does not want to be called gay writer as his being gay is not all about his being a writer) worked his Laws of Creation as editor of Walt Whitman's poems and he also its introduction. So, while reading, I had to check entries in Wiki what the Whitman (as character) or Whitman's poems being read in the story probably meant. Thus, it took me awhile to finish this book and for most times, I just got tired of reading and understanding those lines from Whitman's poems.

Brilliant story carried across from the past, the present and the future. Granted the blurb on the back was hideously wrong, but that did not take anything from the book.
The characters were easy to identify and relate with, and the rich description made visualizing the setting and the story that much easier.
The connections felt forced, in some instances, with the story taking very predictable turns.
Awesome combination of poetry and science fiction as well. I shall definitely read more Walt Whitman.

3 stories. Walt Whitman's word bubbling up on the lips of all three protagonists, in all three stories. The same character names rearranged.

1. A kid with an awful life and effectively dead parents in industrial revolution-era NYC laments his dead brother, is eaten by machines, falls in love with a prostitute. Things are so desperate he starts hallucinating.

2. Present day cop realizes her rich white stock broker boyfriend likes her because she's exotic. There's a child terrorist plot. She abducts and absconds with one of the childs. When she's on the train, she realizes he's evil to the core, even in a lovin' way.

3. Android escapes out of NYC into a post-apocalyptic American west with a dying female alien. He meets his creator, who is building a spaceship. Female dies, Android stays behind on earth.

Overall, three interesting/disturbing/ghostly/depressing/barren stories. But it didn't take me away like an alien abduction though.

I was surprised and delighted by every element of Specimen Days: the precision and freshness of the language, the startling imagery and metaphors, and the utterly novel way of looking at the world. Because of the beauty of the prose I was expecting a story about nothing but the plot quickly became intensely dramatic and entirely unpredictable.

Every detail is meaningful, not just decorative, and the motifs that link the three stories are subtle and clever. The changes in register - from historical, to contemporary to speculative - were so assured, my suspension of disbelief wasn’t strained for a moment, despite the audacity of the concept.

It is wry, funny, insightful and disturbing and provokes thought on an incredible range of contemporary issues including poverty, immigration, race, media, pollution, development, loss and death, without ever feeling preachy or didactic.

Specimen Days is nothing less than astonishing.

He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance. He needed to tell her it was impossible, it was unbearable, to be so continually mistaken for a misshapen boy with a walleye and a pumpkin head and a habit of speaking in fits.
He said, "I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume." It was not what he'd hoped to tell her.

Why haven't I read this delicious puzzle-of-a-book before? Why has only ONE of my GR friends read it? This carefully crafted, beautifully written, genre-defying little treasure is in the same vein as Cloud Atlas, but much shorter and less complicated to follow.

Each of the three 100-page novellas that makes up this novel:
a) takes part in New York City
b) features a man named Simon, a woman named Cat(herine/areen), and a boy named Lucas, (and also, weirdly, a bowl) all of whom take a turn being the main character (except for the bowl)
c) has a character who compulsively quotes Walt Whitman

"In the Machine" is historical fiction set during the Industrial Age, with young Lucas (featured in my opening excerpt) trying to fill the shoes of his dead brother, Simon, by filling his factory position, becoming primary breadwinner for his ailing Irish immigrant parents, and trying to win the heart of Simon's fiancee, Catherine.

Maybe it was time to quit the unit, though if she did it now it would look like she was running away. In fact, she'd been thinking of quitting for some time. You got a little crazy, working the nuts. You listened to every lunatic with the same patience; you reminded yourself over and over that any one of these people might really and truly be about to torch a grade school or blow up a store or kill somebody just because he was well-known. Bartenders must start seeing a world full of drunks; lawyers must see it as largely made up of the vengefully injured. Forensic psychologists got infected by paranoia. You knew, better than the average citizen, that the world contains a subworld, where the residents do as most people do, pay rent and buy groceries, but have a little something extra going on. They receive personal messages from their televisions sets or are raped nightly by a sitcom star or have discovered that the cracks on the sidewalk between Broadway and Lafayette spell out the names of the aliens who are posing as world leaders.

In "The Children's Crusade," Cat is a brilliant, troubled forensic psychologist answering threatening calls for the NYPD in the aftermath of 9/11. A black woman working in a white man's world, she uses her "queenly bearing, schoolmarm diction" to enforce her credibility. When she misses flagging an adolescent caller who goes on to commit an act of terrorism, she finds herself drawn into a larger plot.

She might have been beautiful. "Beautiful" was of course an approximation. An earthly term. The nearest word in her language was "keeram," which more or less meant "better than useful." It was as close as her people came to a lofty abstraction. The bulk of their vocabulary pertained to weather conditions, threats of various kinds, and that which could be eaten, traded, or burned for fuel.
She was by Earth standards a four-and-a-half-foot-tall lizard with prominent nostrils and eyes slightly smaller than golf balls. But Simon believed she might have been glorious on her own planet. She might have been better than useful there.

"Like Beauty" takes place about 150 years in the future, in a NYC which is essentially a nostalgic theme park for foreign tourists, inhabited by down-on-their-luck actors and Nadian refugees from the first inhabited planet with which Earth made contact. Simon is an illegal AI programmed with an urge to travel to Colorado, across the abandoned ruins of middle America.

What's amazing is how well all these stories work. I connected with the characters, lingered over the Mr. Cunningham's prose, dissected Mr. Whitman's poetry (which I clearly need to go back and reread!), and thoroughly enjoyed the entire novel.

A brilliant exegesis of Walt Whitman, told as three novellas, each with the same set of characters, but in different times and places and situations. If that makes any sense at all to you, you should read this book. Cunningham is a gifted writer; he keeps it simple and spare, except for the flights of Whitmanesque borrowings and interpretations. The result is beautiful, creepy, strange, and haunting.

Three different stories addressing New York in three different genres and centuries. At first I wasn't impressed by "In the Machine," the first third, the historical novel portion, because it touched on Whitman and James Joyce without leaving much of an impact or making sense of these references.

But it really can't stand alone; maybe none of the sections can, although starting out of order might be an interesting idea if you want to get more out of "In the Machine."

The ways the three stories connect are the deepest parts of the novel, especially if you pick up on the literary (The Odyssey and Whitman) and New York historical references. The book takes itself pretty seriously but what humor there is (most of it in the last two stories, such as the sci-fi futuristic section's naming kids "Tomcruise" and "Katemoss") is welcome and entertaining. The last section was definitely my favorite; the way he treats the aliens as realistically interacting with humans long after that stereotypical sci-fi first encounter reminds me of the way Jonathan Lethem invents the Archbuilder aliens in the novel Girl in a Landscape.

i went to a reception for this book, had never read anything by him, had never seen the movies. sounded like a terrible novel. wanted to shoot myself.

i ran into him in the bathroom and somehow i started telling him about some personal problems, he listened and gave me advice. on that alone, i decided to read the book.

the first story. done, couldn't do it.
the second story. no way.
the third story... the lizard in the future love story with a robot? i thought it was great. i don't even like fantasy.
i went back to read the other stories and still couldn't do it.

انتهيت من قراءة تلك رواية بعد جلسات متعددة من القراءة، ويرجع ذلك لظروف خارجة عن إرادتي - اللي هي الامتحانات كالعادة- وليس بسبب أن الرواية مملة إطلاقاً!!
ماكل كننجام قسم روايته لثلاث أزمنة مختلفة ( ماضي - حاضر - مستقبل) لا يربط شيء بين هذه الروايات إطلاقا سوى أشعار الشاعر الأمريكي والت ويتمان، وطاس بيضاء مزخرفة، حقا لا أعلم ما الذي شدني للرواية ولماذا أعطتها الأربع النجوم، فالرواية عبارة عن عالم غريب بحق يضعك الكاتب في كل مرة وسط الأحداث وتشعر كأنك دخيل عليها ثم تجري الأحداث وتقلب الصفحات حتى تدرك وبمشقة عن ماذا يجري هنا!!
أنا أعشق ذلك النوع من الأدب، لكن الكاتب يستحق مشفى الأمراض العقلية وبحق!!

Speciman days was not really a novel per se, but more like three linked novellas. The three stories were all set in different time periods: The Industrial Revolution, Present Day New York, 2150 New York. Each story loosely involved three characters named some derivation of Simon, Catherine and Lucas. There was a bowl of some sort that was passed between all of the stories (symbolism of this remains unclear). And then there was Walt Whitman.

In the first story, about a poverty stricken family where the oldest son has been killed (Simon) and the youngest son (11-year old Lucas) must go to work to support his disabled Father, distraught mother and sort of his brother’s fiancee’ widow. Lucas has some sort of problem where he constantly speaks in poetry. Specifically, Walt Whitman poetry. Whitman makes a cameo.

The second story, involves a NYPD call-center psychiatrist who’s job is to answer terrorist phone calls and she hears about a terrorist plot perpetrated by a series of children. Children who keep quoting Whitman. More Whitman references as the plot develops. The context is pseudo-present NYC, however it is in some sort of alternate world where terrorism is much more prevalent than today. Where this is such an all-consuming factor that it almost appears post-apocalyptic.

In the last story, Cunningham was clearly taking some happy pills. It is the story of a Cyborg (Simon) who rescues an alien lizard (Katreen) from persecution for lying to the robot-police and they take off on a cross-country race to Denver to meet up with the cyborg maker before he takes off on his spaceship to colonize another planet, picking up a disenchanted boy missionary with a freakish head (Luke) and dragging him along. Very strange.

I really didn’t get this book at all. Each one was difficult in its own way and I struggled with the writing style. I feel like I almost would have like the last one the best, but was unable to really appreciate it juxtaposed as it was to the other two stories. I am sure I should be pulling some deep meaning from the title “Speciman Days” as they all take place on the same day of the year (June 23 if I remember correctly) but each 150ish years apart.

Blah. I refuse to try to overanalyze this one.

If someone liked it, please tell me why. If forced to choose which I liked best, I would probably go with the middle one, though the ending pissed me off.

Rating: 2.0

Cunningham is one of the great underratted writers. He’s had some recognition, true. But he deserves much more. Each of the connected novellas here is like a little hand grenade going off in the mind. I’ve been reading with deliberate slowness. The language is so sonorous and vivid—despite the genre props—that I savored it thoroughly.

The first, “In The Machine,” reminds me a little of E.L. Doctorow. It’s set in late nineteenth century New York City. A strange “misshapen” boy, Lucas, loses his older brother in a terrible factory accident. Lucas must quit school and go to work at the same machine that killed his brother in order to bring in enough money to feed his aging parents. He’s not yet 13 and falls in love with his late brother’s fiancée. With his gifts—he’s given to quoting Whitman from memory—he foresees a terrible event which saves her life. It’s a very beautiful and sad and strange story.

The second novella,”The Children’s Crusade,” starts like a Richard Price police procedural. Cat talks to psychos on a police hotline. She’s a psychologist who’s recently lost Lucas, her young son. One day a boy hugs a real-estate broker on lower Broadway in New York and blows them both to smithereens. Turns out Cat spoke with him earlier and neglected to red flag it. Oops. A family of little boys it turns out is running around NYC blowing up people up at random. Leaves of Grass is the Good Book from which they sententiously quote as they slaughter. The resolution to this one will set your hair on fire.

In the third, “Like Beauty,” New York is a dystopia. (All the novellas here are dystopias but this one classically so, in an Ursula K. LeGuin sense). Here NYC is a kind of Historic Williamsburg called Old New York. As such it reminds me of the short stories of George Saunders. With this exception, that all the workers here—the theme park reenactors—are robots. Moreover, lizard-like extraterrestrials, the latest wave of interstellar immigrants, work the dead end jobs. NYC is a surveillance state with shoot to kill drones—not police—keeping an eye. The story ends with a wild chase through a Balkanized U.S. not too unlike Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. It’s set in 2150, when the earth is so ruined by human callousness and disregard that the only thing to do, some feel, is leave it.

Clearly Cunningham decided with this book to take on the genres and make them sing. He does so with enviable élan. Any of these tales would make a fine movie, since all are packed with striking detailed description.