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Specimen Days is a genre-bending,
haunting, and transformative ode to life in our greatest
city and a meditation on the direction and meaning
of America's destiny. It is a work of surpassing
power and beauty by one of the most original and
daring writers at work today.
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In each section of Michael Cunningham's bold
new novel, his first since "The Hours", we
encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an
older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine" is
a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial
revolution, as human beings confront the alienating realities
of the new machine age. "The Children's Crusade," set
in the early twenty-first century, plays with the conventions
of the noir thriller as it tracks the pursuit of a terrorist
band that is detonating bombs, seemingly at random, around
the city. The third part, "Like Beauty," evokes
a New York 150 years into the future, when the city is
all but overwhelmed by refugees from the first inhabited
planet to be contacted by the people of Earth.
Presiding over each episode of this interrelated whole
is the prophetic figure of the poet Walt Whitman, who promised
his future readers, "It avails not, neither time or
place ... I am with you, and know how it is."
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