Over the years, I've been following Mr. Cunningham's writing with interest and pleasure. Flesh and Blood and a Home at the End of the World are compelling, very moving works of fiction. The Hours has many felicities too, but on the other hand already show traces of the problems that make Specimen Days, in my view, so unsatisfying: both, in a way, wear their skeletons on the outside. The narrative and metaphoric construction of Specimen Days, especially, is so obviously contrived that it draws attention away from the storytelling itself. Worse, as you go along the storylines seem more and more random; as if the guiding structure could have been filled in in many different ways, too, without making much difference to the final result.
Specimen Days in fact consists of three separate novellas, in which similar characters, situations, and symbols recur in different contexts. They share the theme of people going through a traumatic experience that leads them to break away from their settled routines. The pantheistic visions of Walt Whitman are offered as a philosophical framework, but unfortunately remain a 'Fremdkrper' throughout. Of the three stories, I found the first one the most convincing. It has a peculiar, gloomy atmosphere, tinged with surrealism, that is fascinating in a way, though it precludes any sense of real contact with the characters. In a 19th century setting, the boy Lukas goes to work in the factory where his brother was killed a week ago, in fact operating the same machine that Lukas now has to work with. The boy becomes convinced that his brother's ghost is in the machine, and in other machines, too. Eventually his visions drive him to a desperately heroic act to save the life of his brother's fiancee, Catherine. In the second novella, we again meet Catharine, now a black police psychologist in the 20th century. She is probably the most recognizable person in the book for most readers. The story in which she appears will appeal to CSI-audiences and readers of crime novels. It is thrilling in its way, but also rather thin. The pivotal twist in the plot occurs rather sudden and is unconvincing from a psychological point of view.
However, no matter what one thinks of the first two novellas, they are absolute masterpieces compared to the embarrassing concluding story, 'Like Beauty'. At first I took it this sci-fi pastiche was an elaborate and not particularly funny joke, but as I went along I started to fear the author actually meant for us to take it seriously. In this Pinoccio-meets-Star Trek spoof, Catharine has turned into Catareen, a small, lizard-like, and yes: green, alien. As a refugee from the planet Nadia she's now a nanny for some rich NYC family, two centuries from now. She meets the half-robot Simon, who's an actor in New York, which has been turned into a theme-park where people get mugged on (their own) demand. Together, they set off to give their lives a new direction. It is too wearisome even to summarize the ludicrous plot. The text is sprinkled with little finds that the author probably though quite amusing, but in fact often detract from its believability. (The kids that Catareen takes care of are called Tomcruise and Katemoss, which is just about as likely as twentieth century kids being called Lordbyron and Janeausten.) Disperate elements are strung together willy-nilly to infuse an impression of higher meaning - even the strangely luminous bowl from the previous two stories finds its way into this one.
But mere collage of a handful of ides-fixes does not by itself make a good work of literature. I was also increasingly irritated by the author's far-fetched metaphors. ("...her face was vague, as if someone had drawn the features of a woman on the front of her head and then tried to erase them." I don't know how long the author took to come up with that one, but you have only to try and envision it to find that it is utter nonsense).
I finished Specimen Days with a sense of great disappointment and of time (and money) wasted. From a recent interview I gathered Cunningham is planning to go even further down this path in his future work. If he does, he has lost this reader.
Over the years, I've been following Mr. Cunningham's writing with interest and pleasure. Flesh and Blood and a Home at the End of the World are compelling, very moving works of fiction. The Hours has many felicities too, but on the other hand already show traces of the problems that make Specimen Days, in my view, so unsatisfying: both, in a way, wear their skeletons on the outside. The narrative and metaphoric construction of Specimen Days, especially, is so obviously contrived that it draws attention away from the storytelling itself. Worse, as you go along the storylines seem more and more random; as if the guiding structure could have been filled in in many different ways, too, without making much difference to the final result. Specimen Days in fact consists of three separate novellas, in which similar characters, situations, and symbols recur in different contexts. They share the theme of people going through a traumatic experience that leads them to break away from their settled routines. The pantheistic visions of Walt Whitman are offered as a philosophical framework, but unfortunately remain a 'Fremdkrper' throughout. Of the three stories, I found the first one the most convincing. It has a peculiar, gloomy atmosphere, tinged with surrealism, that is fascinating in a way, though it precludes any sense of real contact with the characters. In a 19th century setting, the boy Lukas goes to work in the factory where his brother was killed a week ago, in fact operating the same machine that Lukas now has to work with. The boy becomes convinced that his brother's ghost is in the machine, and in other machines, too. Eventually his visions drive him to a desperately heroic act to save the life of his brother's fiancee, Catherine. In the second novella, we again meet Catharine, now a black police psychologist in the 20th century. She is probably the most recognizable person in the book for most readers. The story in which she appears will appeal to CSI-audiences and readers of crime novels. It is thrilling in its way, but also rather thin. The pivotal twist in the plot occurs rather sudden and is unconvincing from a psychological point of view. However, no matter what one thinks of the first two novellas, they are absolute masterpieces compared to the embarrassing concluding story, 'Like Beauty'. At first I took it this sci-fi pastiche was an elaborate and not particularly funny joke, but as I went along I started to fear the author actually meant for us to take it seriously. In this Pinoccio-meets-Star Trek spoof, Catharine has turned into Catareen, a small, lizard-like, and yes: green, alien. As a refugee from the planet Nadia she's now a nanny for some rich NYC family, two centuries from now. She meets the half-robot Simon, who's an actor in New York, which has been turned into a theme-park where people get mugged on (their own) demand. Together, they set off to give their lives a new direction. It is too wearisome even to summarize the ludicrous plot. The text is sprinkled with little finds that the author probably though quite amusing, but in fact often detract from its believability. (The kids that Catareen takes care of are called Tomcruise and Katemoss, which is just about as likely as twentieth century kids being called Lordbyron and Janeausten. ) Disperate elements are strung together willy-nilly to infuse an impression of higher meaning - even the strangely luminous bowl from the previous two stories finds its way into this one. But mere collage of a handful of ides-fixes does not by itself make a good work of literature. I was also increasingly irritated by the author's far-fetched metaphors. ("... her face was vague, as if someone had drawn the features of a woman on the front of her head and then tried to erase them. " I don't know how long the author took to come up with that one, but you have only to try and envision it to find that it is utter nonsense). I finished Specimen Days with a sense of great disappointment and of time (and money) wasted. From a recent interview I gathered Cunningham is planning to go even further down this path in his future work. If he does, he has lost this reader.