New York Nightmares
GOREAU, ANGELINE
New York Nightmares Specimen Days By Michael Cunningham Farrar Straus Giroux. 308 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Angeline Goreau Author, "Reconstructing Aphra"; contributor, New York "Times Book...
...Rather, he might be said to inhabit, infuse, haunt, inform...
...Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue...
...Tonight there were no candlelight vigils, no mounds of flowers, no women wailing...
...The Christians seemed to have regained their majority on the Council...
...There are explicit allusions: women jumping from the windows of the burning Triangle Shirtwaist factory, the suicide bombings...
...To say he play's a part is perhaps an understatement...
...Any deviation from his script is met by inquiries from one of many constantly surveying drones...
...In the third section of Specimen Days, Simon-the dead man in the first one and a rather pale futures trader in the second-seizes the story, now set 150 years in the future...
...But the section's historical momentthe industrial revolution and its despoiling of life and landscape-is indelibly bound up with its meaning...
...Dalloway), Specimen Days harks back to the poet's 1882 prose parallel to Leaves of Grass...
...We're so obese we need bigger cemetery plots...
...Uttered by various characters throughout, pasted on walls, encountered in unexpected venues, Whitman's incantations add immeasurably to the profound inscrutability of Specimen Days...
...contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "TLS" ECSTATIC, visionary, displaced in his own century, Walt Whitman seems ideally suited for his role in Michael Cunningham's new Specimen Days...
...The section starts with a death: Lucas' older brother Simon is crushed in the die-stamping machine he operates, just days before he was to marry Catherine, a young shirtwaist worker...
...The book, Cunningham's first since his remarkable The Hours (1998), takes up many of the themes familiar to readers of his earlier works: the difficulty of separating past and present, self and others, literature and life, the real and imagined worlds...
...A young boy obsessively quoting Whitman-Lucas' doppelganger-phones to say offhandedly that he plans to blow somebody up and "I thought I should tell someone...
...The poet died in 1892, but the fire, which killed 146 young women, took place in 1911...
...As much as Cunningham's novel is haunted by the ghost of Whitman's prophecies, it is profoundly informed by the events of September 11,2001...
...She was by Earth standards," Cunningham tells us, "a four-and-a-half-foot-tall lizard with prominent nostrils and eyes slightly smaller than golf balls...
...Our 10year-olds are doing heroin, or they're murdering eightyear-olds, or both...
...You had to bring a building down to make things look different...
...Do you see joy...
...Humans, it appears, are in short supply...
...The opening tale takes place in what appears to be either the last years of the 19th century or the first of the 20th...
...Cunningham's brilliantly imagined dystopian future represents the final betrayal of Walt Whitman's joyously democratic America...
...Whitman described his autobiographical Specimen Days as the "most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed...
...And just as Cunningham borrowed his previous title from Virginia Woolf (The Hours was her early working title for Mr...
...We're getting divorced faster than we're getting married We're bombing countries simply because they make us nervous So tell me...
...The narrative is divided into three parts, belonging to three different historical periods...
...Whitman's breathless embrace of democracy's promise and boundless confidence in its workings stand in contrast with the dreary sweatshop conditions that circumscribe Cunningham's characters...
...Catareen (read Catherine, or Cat), the female he eventually attaches himself to, is an exile from the planet Nadia...
...emerging from him with improbable force...
...On the oddly unchanged Broadway, Cat observes: "If you didn't know what had happened, you could easily believe it wasjust another night in the city...
...The child suicide bombers, the old woman explains, are "part of the plan to tell people that it's all over...
...His poetry figures in a way that may well be unique in the novel as we know it, acting at once as motive, symbol and musical theme, introduced over and over in the kind of variations one finds in a Bach invention...
...Simon himself is a "simulo"-a flesh-covered armature whose microchips have been programmed to imitate human behavior...
...There is a woman named Catherine or Cat or Catareen in every story, as well as a boy named Lucas or Luke and a man named Simon...
...She spends her days taking calls on a police hot line and attempting to ascertain whether any of the nuts threatening to off themselves or others mean business...
...Cunningham's novel, however, is highly structured...
...Would you say this is working out...
...Whitman), racketed on...
...No more sucking the life out of the rest of the world so that a small percentage of the population can live comfortably...
...The city was only being rocked in its less visible parts, along its filaments, in its dreams of itself...
...A white-haired woman, she declares with millennial zeal: "Look around...
...Our teeth don't rot...
...Finally, the agent behind the deadly "children's crusade" presents herself...
...It seems beside the point in the age of modern metafiction to discuss whether a novelist ought to be taking such liberties, and I suspect most readers will be willing to allow Cunningham-whose storytelling powers are compelling-whatever latitude he requires...
...each bears the imprint of Whitman's great poem and essentially reinvents its characters...
...Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," Lucas intones in the midst of one otherwise ordinary exchange...
...There is a sense of Big Brother watching, yet no one seems to know exactly what the rules are, or how they might have changed: "There seemed to have been an election," Simon says...
...History, she declares, is always changed by a small band of people...
...People were scared, and yes, it was impossible to know yet just how much money was bleeding out, how many reservations were being canceled, how many corporations were considering relocating, but Broadway was still full of cabs and trucks, stores were still open, unfortunates still worked the passersby for change...
...But he himself is working under a generalized sense of threat...
...It is Simon's job to "threaten" tourists seeking thrills...
...As Cat seeks desperately to understand what is happening, suicide bombings by Whitman-spouting children multiply...
...To someone a hundred years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself...
...Do you see happiness...
...One difficulty in pinning down the time arises from the protagonist meeting Walt Whitman initially on Broadway, then at what became known as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire...
...Our children aren't a little feverish one moment and dead the next...
...THE SECOND segment takes place in a putative present that is seen through the eyes of a black woman named Cat...
...And it ends with the possible death of Lucas, his body fed to the same machine that consumed his brother...
...The strict sequence ofhistorical events," Cunningham tells us in an Author's Note, "tends to run counter to the needs of the storyteller...
...The nameless country he evokes is wasted and unhinged to the degree that its most sympathetic citizensthose who still seem to have some connection to the earth itself-happen to be green lizards from a planet called Nadia...
...The fits are involuntary quotations from Leaves of Grass...
...Americans have never been this prosperous...
...The machinery of the city, the immense discordant poetry of the city (thank you, Mr...
...Titled "In the Machine," it is observed by 12-year-old Lucas, a "misshapen boy with a walleye and a pumpkin head and a habit of speaking in fits...
...How else to explain the upsurge in Christian comedies and dramas all over the vid [the novel's name for a future video device], the increasing stringency of law enforcement...
...There's no dung in the milk__And look at us...
...The whole city of New York has been transformed into a kind of Disney reality show, where Simon and others are hired to play roles...
...We can fly...
...Although it is hard to go along with this at the outset, Cunningham's powerful lyrical pull ultimately draws us in...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
