Specimen Days [Paperback]

The result is a volume of three interwoven tales, each laced with deliciously fluid lines from Whitman, including two that recur, hauntingly, throughout: "...for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" and "...to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier."

Throughout the book, characters are obsessed with Walt Whitman, and several quote his prose compulsively while traversing the city of New York over the decades, from the Industrial Revolution to the future. In the first section, the Whitman-obsessed is a deformed child named Luke who works in an ironworks factory and is in love with his dead brother's seamstress fiancé. In the second section (which takes place the present day) the Whitman-quoter is another deformed child, one who has spent his life trapped in an apartment with walls covered in the pages of "Leaves of Grass" and has been raised to be a terrorist. The third section delves into science fiction, with a Whitman-programmed character who is half-human, half-robot, and travels across a radiation-wasted United States with an alien companion.

Readers will be appalled and fascinated at the possibilities raised: Is technology dooming the planet? Will things become even more unsafe for everyday citizens? If we find life on another planet, will we be disappointed?

"Specimen Days" is disturbing, yes, but impossible to give up on, even for the squeamish. Michael Cunningham's imaginative stories are irresistible even when they are nightmarish, and his writing is lyrical and filled with gorgeous imagery and turns of phrase. A wonderful book, but try it for yourself! Pick up a copy. Another book I need to recommend -- very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition," an odd, compelling little novel I can't stop thinking about.

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Really, though, it doesn't matter and I didn't mind. I was quite happy just to be led through and briefly recognise little nuggets of meaning as they tripped past, savouring the relationships Cunningham gives his characters, the writing and the stories. It's not word too long, either, which is nice to see. Most novels nowadays are too long (less is always more; it takes more skill to condense than to expand, and success always gives a more powerful novel). I'm not really sure I'm capable of unwrapping the meaning of the book (if it even has a thread you can pull that will give its "meaning" - or even a few), but what it does do unquestionably is present a series of fascinating ideas and themes.

The verse of Walt Whitman is another recurring theme, and I was a little confounded by it. As a device it is integral to the meaning, but as part of the story it's unnecessary in the extreme, forced and a little self-conscious. I didn't really know what to make of all these characters spouting lines of poetry at random. If this is a "Whitman" book, and "The Hours" is his "Woolf" book, The Hours is far more successful. Though, admittedly, he is using Whitman for a different kind of thing. But the Whitman does see a little out of place at times, even if it does make for a nice way of commenting on relationship between inchoate art and the concrete human world.

Each novella is, individually, very entertaining and very well-written, the interaction between the characters is particularly good. Taken apart, they're very good indeed. Taken together, they are even more rewarding. It's not as good as The Hours, but Specimen Days is, though a bit of an enigma, an unfalteringly interesting and enjoyable book about humanity and its place in the world it has created.