It was a delight to see Michael Cunningham in Concord, NH, the other night. He’s on the road promoting his new novel, Day, about a family in Brooklyn. Day takes place over three April days in 2019, 2020, and 2021. Yes, a pandemic novel, but the novel never mentions the words “pandemic” or “Covid.” (My review, for BookPage, is below.)
In March of 2020, Cunningham was halfway through another novel, and like many writers, he couldn’t write or read in those early pandemic months. And then, as he began to write again, he also began to feel that it was immoral not to include the pandemic in his work. “Your choices were to act as if the pandemic weren’t happening, or walk into what is happening and write the novel you don’t want to read,” he said.
About his writing process, he noted that at 80 or 90 pages in, the point at which the novel has begun to become itself, “I look at what I’ve got, and I think this is ridiculous, this is garbage, and I should dump this. Every time. What’s happening is the novel is shedding whatever ideas I had about it, and it’s becoming what it’s going to become.”
You may remember Cunningham’s gorgeous 2003 novel The Hours, partly a reworking of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which follows three characters: Clarissa Vaughan, a New York City woman in her early 50s who’s planning a party for her poet friend who’s dying of AIDS—she’s the updated, present-day Mrs. Dalloway in the novel; Laura Brown, an unhappy young mom in 1950s suburban California; and Virginia Woolf, as she struggles to write the pages that will become Mrs. Dalloway. It’s one of my all-time favorite novels (as is Mrs. Dalloway, with its close attention to Clarissa Dalloway, an ordinary woman at midlife), and Cunningham evokes these women’s voices so believably and beautifully. Cunningham has spent a lot of time reading Virginia Woolf, and he noted that one of the many things he learned from her has to do with scope. “Every writer has a scale or scope,” he said. “Some of us are drawn to looking up at the cosmos, others to the subatomic. I’m drawn to the small…I’m interested in the nuances and complexities in marriages that aren’t quite happy and aren’t completely unhappy.”
Coincidentally, I was assigned to review Day for November BookPage. Here’s my review:
Michael Cunningham has used three timelines to great effect in his novels Specimen Days and The Hours, his acclaimed homage to Mrs. Dalloway. He does so once again in Day, which follows a Brooklyn family on the same April day over three years: 2019, 2020 and 2021.
As Day opens, Isabel and Dan, in early midlife, are muddling through an ordinary morning with their school-age kids, Nathan and Violet. Isabel is a creative director in an industry that has mostly evaporated, and Dan is a former rocker who still yearns for the spotlight. Isabel’s brother, Robbie, teaches sixth grade history and lives in their attic bedroom. Though the point of view roves among characters and occasionally out over the Brooklyn landscape, it’s Robbie who forms the center of the novel. Robbie’s feeling regret about his ex, Oliver, and about his long-ago decision to turn down medical school. Now he’s about to make a big change: Isabel has asked him to move out. Everyone’s floundering, including secondary characters Garth (Dan’s brother) and his ex Chess, who struggle to navigate their new status as parents. The only one who’s not floundering is Wolfe, Robbie’s Instagram persona—a perfect, though fictional, gay man.
The novel’s middle section takes place a year later, on an April day during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, with Robbie stranded in Iceland, Isabel trying to manage her worries about her kids and her marriage, and Dan starting to write songs again. This section incorporates emails, texts, letters and stretches of unadorned dialogue, including a heartbreaking phone conversation between Isabel and her dad. One year later, in April 2021, the cast of characters gathers upstate, each changed in their place in life and in their relationships with one another.
Despite contemporary details like Instagram follows, Zoom school and long text exchanges, Day has a dreamy, timeless feel. Using gorgeous, often heightened prose, Cunningham offers intimate glimpses of weighty moments instead of big scenes to examine the family’s strands of connection and disconnection, along with the ripple effects of the pandemic. Day may be a spare, short novel, but it’s a novel that asks to be read meditatively, rather than rushed through.
For a little more Michael Cunningham, here’s his memorable short story “White Angel,” a story about two brothers in the late ‘60s, from the perspective of the younger brother, who idolizes his older, troubled brother. It originally ran in The New Yorker in 1988, and has been widely anthologized.
Watching
If you haven’t seen the movie The Holdovers, add it to your holiday watch list! It’s a dramedy, the story of three unhappy people forced together over the holidays at a New England boarding school in 1970. The stellar cast: Paul Giamatti as a fussy, lonely classics teacher, Da’Vine Joy Randolph as a grieving mom, and Dominic Sessa as a troubled prep-school student. This is one of those movies that you know where it’s going, generally, but along the way you get some surprising revelations. The Holdovers evokes the early ‘70s and the boarding-school world beautifully, but lightly, with an evocative soundtrack. If you’ve seen it, let me know what you thought!
Even the movie’s trailer feels like a trailer from the ‘70s:
I’ll leave you with a photo from the other morning, when everything was sparkling at sunrise, after a night of rain. 💕
I´d love to read Cunningham´s new book! loved The Hours. And the movie :)
Adding the Hours to my list!