Examining the Specimin

Cunningham, Michael. Specimin Days

Specimin Days is a strikingly beautiful book with that same reflective quiet and strangeness I love from other Cunningham novels The Hours and A Home at the End of the World. The two most notable things about Specimen Days are its post-9/11 vision of New York and its strange combination of genres.

It's hard to specifically say how Specimin Days reflects on a post-9/11 world, but it does have a sensibility that evokes the strangeness and fragility of the modern city. Each of the images of New York City in the novel has a life of its own and as such is both beloved and slightly dangerous. The city is populated with images of fear and death as well as beauty and love.

The book is composed of 3 parts which are in many ways separate novellas. Each takes place in separate eras in New York's history, but 4 characters are mysteriously reincarnated and interwoven throughout the stories in interesting ways. The four characters are Luke, a strange and sensitive young boy with an overly-large round head that comes from a birth defect; Catherine, a beautiful and self-suffient older woman; Simon a stereotypically perfect, beautiful man; and Walt Whitman. Whitman is woven through the story as quotation, inspiration, and godlike-presence. He's not as much of a character as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, but really more of a religion.

The three novellas are each expirimentations in different types of genre fiction and each is focused around a different one of the three main characters. The first story is a ghost story set against the modernization of the Industrial Revolution. It takes place in New York in the 1890s and in it Whitman is an actual presence, a magical figure that Luke runs into on the street, and image of life and vitality in contrast to the machinery of the factory in which he works. The second story is a crime drama centered around Catherine in the present (about 2002) and it deals with the fear that death from terrorism can happen randomly to anyone at any time. The third is a Science Fiction story in which Catherine is a lizard woman from another planet and Simon is a (gay?) robot.

The issues I haven't quite thought through include religious imagery (why are they all named after Catholic saints?) and the drive to leave New York, the need to escape the city. Also, there wasn't really any explicitly gay content at all, which I found a little disappointing. Cunningham has dealt with issues of sexuality so beautifully in the past, but for some reason he does so within heterosexual pairings this time. Whitman, of course, is certainly queer content enough and his celebration of the city and people is a beautiful thread throughout the novel. Overall, it's a beautiful, fascinating, provokative novel and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It left me in a strange, reflective mood, but that is in no way a bad thing.