For his follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning THE HOURS, author Michael Cunningham has tried his hand at another novel comprised of three loosely connected stories. This time, however, his muse is not Virginia Woolf but Walt Whitman. And it’s not garnering much acclaim.
And rightfully so, because SPECIMEN DAYS is just shy of being half good. Cunningham deserves credit for attempting to write in three different genres: a Gothic ghost story, a modern-day police thriller and a futuristic sci-fi tale. This trio shares little in common except a New York City setting and a few character names (though the characters are not the same), one of whom readily quotes poet Walt Whitman, albeit due to forces beyond his control. Don’t attempt to thread them together; it will only drive you insane. Actually, a good third of the book will do that to you alone.
It begins alright enough, with “In the Machine,” in which a poor young boy – desperate to feed his family during the Industrial Revolution – takes a dangerous factory job, one vacated when his older brother was killed by the machine he carelessly manned. The boy, Lucas, carries a torch for the fiancée his big brother left behind, but it’s a romance doomed to remain unrequited. With poverty, hunger and heartbreak already eating at his underaged soul, the last thing Lucas needs is a good ol’ fashioned haunting. But he begins to hear his brother’s voice, moaning and aching from not only the machine at work, but all machines he encounters. This is a good setup, but Cunningham is unable to find a satisfying conclusion; though you expect the end to be tragic, a head-scratching one is unforgivable. “Machine” represents Cunningham’s stab at horror, or at least his idea of horror; describing an injured man simply as having an “arm in tatters” doesn’t quite go far enough to make us feel the pain.
The middle story, “The Children’s Crusade,” is easily the best. Set in the present day, it concerns Kat, an African-American woman who tries to distract herself from the details of her sad life (dead child, failed marriage, empty sex) by remaining commited to her work manning a phone line at the police station, where she employs a calm voice to dissuade call-in criminals from carrying out heinous threats. It doesn’t always work, as the city is thrown into chaos when a child rigged with a bomb hugs a random stranger in public and blows them both up. As the incident soon proves to be the first of a series, Kat lets down her guard and gets too involved in the situation. With its unique mix of the personal, the procedural and an utterly bizarre terrorist plot, “Crusade” is twisting and compelling, with an end that positively chills.
But SPECIMEN’s final novella – to be fair, that’s what these really are – is a complete bust. Titled “Like Beauty,” it takes place about a 150 years from now, when lizard-like creatures from another world live among us, and have names like “Tomcruise” and make money by mugging foreign tourists in Central Park who pay for the pleasure to be mugged. A story never quite takes shape, mired as the details are in pretension. It stands as the book’s downfall; had it been just okay, there would be enough to merit a recommendation. Taken as a whole, however, Cunningham’s experiment is a failure – perhaps a noble one, but a failure nonetheless, like a disappointing issue of AMAZING STORIES for the crowd who drinks their flavored coffees with a pinky extended. –Rod Lott
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