ichael Cunningham's Specimen Days consists of three thematically and symbolically linked novellas set in New York City and separated by between 150 and 200 years, beginning in the mid-1800s and ending sometime in the 22nd century.
The first, "In the Machine," is a ghost story. Lucas is a 12-year-old boy whose older brother, Simon, has just been horribly killed in an industrial accident at the sweatshop factory where he operated a metal press. With Simon's death, Lucas has inherited his dangerous job ... and, in his own mind at least, responsibility for Simon's fiancée, Catherine. Lucas is a strange boy, physically stunted, with a grotesquely misshapen head, whose mind follows peculiar pathways of thought and association: notably in his ability, not always exercised with conscious volition, to quote passages from Leaves of Grass that possess an oracular power. In the drudgery of his new employment, Lucas comes to believe that Simon's ghost is trapped in the machine and hungering for Catherine's death. It is up to him to save her.
The second novella, "The Children's Crusade," takes place five or 10 years from today. The War on Terror is still in full swing, city and business officials continue to squabble over what kind of memorial to 9/11 should be built at Ground Zero, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened. Here Cunningham works in the mode of the contemporary thriller, with New York terrorized by child suicide bombers led by a Kaczynski-like maniac whose philosophy seems drawn from the poetry of Whitman. In the aftermath of last week's London bombings, this is decidedly chilling, more topical than the author could have dreamed.
The third novella, "Like Beauty," has the trappings of post-apocalyptic science fiction but is really a mythic fantasy in the peculiarly American mode of The Wizard of Oz and Shane. Here an android "simulo" named Simon embarks on a cross-country odyssey, searching for his inventor, a recluse who, whether for scientific reasons or whimsical ones, gave each of his simulos a "poetry chip" containing the complete works of a particular poet. It will surprise no one to learn that Simon's chip contains the works of Whitman. Joining him on his quest for reasons of their own are a lizardlike alien named Catareen and a dwarfish boy named Luke.
Singing the country electric
This luminous novel by the author of the literary bestseller The
Hours is a moving meditation on the humanizing power of empathy and
the horrors stemming from its lack, as well as a loving exploration of
New York City, as a microcosm of America itself, through lenses of
myth, poetry and genre fiction. It is a multitudinous novel of
celebration and grieving, of Faulknerian endurance, with the scars of
9/11 at its heart.
Readers will have noticed the repetition of certain names and themes
in the above synopsis. Even as the narrative of each novella drives
relentlessly forward to its unique and dramatic conclusion, its
elements are in constant dialogue with the other stories of the
triptych, enriching their meaning and impact and recapitulating
structurally the temporal resonances of the fictions themselves. It's
not just names that echo back and forth, from past to present to future
and back again, weaving an intricate web of associations, but also
objects and places, lines of poetry, images and symbols that recur in
various permutations. This process builds to a conclusion of mythic proportions, deeply poignant, mysterious, full of hope and longing amid devastation and despair, like Whitman's poetry, like America itself.
Cunningham's characters may share the same or similar names, but they are not doppelgangers. Lucas, from "In the Machine," is the most memorable, a character who would not be out of place in Sturgeon's More Than Human, but Catareen, the alien in "Like Beauty," also comes wonderfully to life, while the simulo Simon has all the naïve enthusiasm of the Tin Man.
What's truly amazing about Specimen Days, though, is the extent to which Whitman's pervasive presence comes to feel justified and not merely a literary device. The cumulative potency of his lines, radiating out in all directions through the narrative and beyond, is a testament to his greatness and continuing relevance as poet and prophet. As he wrote in Leaves of Grass: "I project the history of the future."
