Book Review: Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham

I saw the movie The Hours, based on a novel by Michael Cunningham, so I thought I'd try reading one of his books myself. Specimen Days, much like The Hours, tells three stories that share similar plot lines. In The Hours, it's Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway and suicide. In Specimen Days, it's Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and 3 basic characters: a youngish adult male, a (usually slightly) older female, and a young boy in his teens (the character types remain the same -- the actual characters are different people). The novel's title comes from Whitman's autobiography, published in 1882 (Cunningham made a similar borrowing for The Hours, which was the working title for Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway).

All three sections are set in New York. Section one is set in New York circa 1880, section two is set circa 2010, and section three is set circa 2155. Cunningham knows how to write a beautiful sentence and he portrays his characters with understanding, evoking empathy in the reader. All three stories employ the limited-omniscient viewpoint, with each central character providing the focal point for a section (the young boy in the first section, the woman in the second, and the adult male in the third).

Most interesting to me were the ways in which the novel resonates with class issues. In all three sections, "throw away" members of society figure prominently.

In the first section, the characters are all working class and essentially disposable members of society. In fact, the novel's action begins with the aftermath of the death of Simon, the adult male character, in a factory accident. His younger brother Lucas, obsessed with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, takes his place and becomes convinced that machines are partially alive.

When Lucas sees the machines as living objects, he understands their desire to consume the people who work them. Lucas at the machine becomes less than human, only a method of feeding the machine parts and by extension, another part to be fed to the machine.

Cunningham manages to touch on several of today's important issues: race and gender relations, immigration, homelessness/underclass, and to an extent cloning (although that's more of the "replicant" variety). His New York of the future is pretty funny, especially considering this piece of recent news.