Specimen Days, by Michael Cunningham
A lovely quirky novel of past, present, and future
(Review posted 27 Jun 2005 01:10:12)

There is a collection of Walt Whitman essays, something like two hundred one-page essays or journal entries or thoughts, that goes by the name Specimen Days. This novel by Michael Cunningham is only three stories, and they're each much longer than a page, but Walt Whitman (or at least his poetry) plays a role in each of them, and the title is no doubt a further tribute to the man.

Each of the three stories could stand alone; the threads that join them (Whitman, a child named Lucas and two adults named Catherine and Simon, a white bowl, the city of New York) are thin but intriguing. I enjoyed looking for subtler and deeper parallels between them, and while I'm not at all sure that there are any my mind's natural habit of looking for them probably made me look a bit deeper into the stories than I would have otherwise.

Cunningham is just a very good writer. He does humanity and emotion and life and death and beauty and the mystery of meaning without getting sticky or awkward. His prose is limpid and flowing and good, and his storytelling is fine (fine in the good sense of "fine"). The settings are engaging (old New York, modern New York, and a future rather dystopian New York and elsewhere), and the underlying fabric is about life and worthwhileness and acceptance (see Walt Whitman again). This is a book you ought to read.