A weird, dazzling trip through time
By DAVID KIRBY
Published July 10, 2005
SPECIMEN DAYS
By Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 320 pp
Reviewed by DAVID KIRBY
Poetry's the go-to genre when times are tough. As Martin Arnold wrote in the New York Times shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, "Poetry is the literary version of the sound bite. It's Internet and e-mail friendly precisely because it has the pared-down power of words in their purest form." That is why a poem by Auden on the Nazi invasion of Poland and one by Yeats on the Irish troubles were e-mailed around the world and printed in newspapers and read on television and radio as part of what Arnold calls "a shared comfort" after the terrorist attacks.
Michael Cunningham ups the ante in his new novel by insisting that poetry is essential to all times, tough or not. Specimen Days takes its title from a book of the same name by Walt Whitman, a collection of more than 200 short prose pieces that was published in 1882. Whitman called the book "free gossip mostly," and in it chronicled haphazardly everything he loved and hated about America. Cunningham's Specimen Days has three parts, all set in New York and linked by recurring characters: Part one takes place in Whitman's lifetime, the next in the present era and the third 150 years in the future.
The first part, called "In the Machine," is set at the height of the Industrial Revolution. People who had been farming for years moved to the city to get rich, and most of them ended up working 12-hour days at dirty, dangerous jobs. A factory worker named Simon has been crushed to death in the press he operated and is mourned by his sweetheart Catherine and a mooncalf of a boy named Lucas who is besotted with Whitman's poetry, quoting him constantly and throwing out his own occasional conversation stopper, such as, "The dead sing to us through machinery." Whitman himself makes a brief appearance.
The middle part, "The Children's Crusade," is the most satisfying; it's a white-knuckler that feeds right into our current obsession with terrorism. Here Catherine, now called Cat, is an African-American who works at a "deterrence unit," dealing with hotheads and trying to stop trouble before it starts. Tired of skateboarding and sassing their parents, apparently, kids are starting to walk up to strangers, hug them and detonate the bombs they're wearing under their jackets. One of her contacts is Lucas, still spouting Whitman but now the disciple of a white-haired archangel of death in a "shapeless coffee-colored dress," a geriatric Charlene Manson who hates everything the Industrial Revolution spawned and is recruiting children to bring America down around its own ears. Simon, whose role is not much bigger in this section than it was in part one, is part of the problem; he's a futures trader.
Simon takes his place in the world in part three, called "Like Beauty." But what a world! Here Simon is a humanoid working for Dangerous Encounters Ltd., a firm that arranges muggings and other violent (if scripted) encounters so that earthlings can enjoy the occasional frisson of terror in the sanitized city of the future. Catareen, as she is now called, is a Nadian, specifically a "four-and-a-half-foot-tall lizard with prominent nostrils and eyes slightly smaller than golf balls." Catareen is beautiful in a lizard-y way, and Simon is just human enough to fall for her, so they light out for the Free Territories, singing Springsteen's Born to Run as they fly under the radar of whoever's in charge, which isn't quite clear (though it's nice to know that people are still listening to the classics in 2155). In Ohio they meet a boy named Luke, the closest thing to a regular person in this part of the book. At least he's not quoting poetry by the ream; Simon is the designated Whitman spouter here.
In short, this is a profoundly weird book, one that dazzles, irritates and is impossible to put down; even the irritations fascinate. Cunningham's last novel, The Hours, was made into a critically acclaimed film, though the nasal prosthesis that Nicole Kidman wore in her portrayal of Virginia Woolf got more press than any of the film's nuances. A movie version of Specimen Days is going to need special effects fancier than a fake nose. No doubt producers will rely on the full force of George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic to lift this novel out of its binding and make it fly.
One thing you won't hear in the movie version is so much of Whitman's poetry. Quoting a poem to someone is like telling a joke: You might have an effect, but the act itself is a monologue, and it's clear that you're trying to impress your listeners, not to listen to them. On the novel's second page, when Lucas says to Catherine, "I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume," you think to yourself, a little of this is going to go a long way. Catherine's response is exactly the right one: "I should go now," she says.
The problem is that poetry is a jealous god; it wants to say everything to everyone every time it speaks, and it doesn't want to play second fiddle to some storyteller, even one as gifted as Michael Cunningham.
There is one moment though when quoting poetry does work in Specimen Days. In part one, Lucas meets Walt Whitman and starts to quote Whitman's own poetry to him.
The poet, of course, loves it.
- Poet David Kirby is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University and author most recently of The Ha-Ha. For more information, see www.davidkirby.com