The most potent incidences of beauty were the ones that felt like personal discoveries, that seemed to have been meant specifically for you, as if some vast intelligence had singled you out and wanted to show you something. - Specimen Days
If one is going to talk about Specimen Days, one is going to have to talk about the city, any city. Cities are generally thought to be places where people make something of themselves. It is not uncommon for people from rural places to relocate to cities for the promise of financial stability, however little. A city represents power; in the form of money, high-rise buildings, factories, various modes of transportation … even the smog may be associated with power. However much people are attracted to an urban setting, though, there are some who find it unbearably constraining and cannot wait to leave. In Michael Cunningham’s (of The Hours’ fame) latest, the characters all want out.
Set in New York, Specimen Days is divided into three parts, all of which talk about the same city but at different periods. The first part is New York at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Lucas, thirteen years old, is forced to grow up and stop school not only because of poverty but because Simon, his older brother, was killed operating a machine that manufactures spare parts. The factory then agrees to hire Lucas to take Simon’s place, a gesture that can be attributed more to employee shortage than compassion. As a result, the burden of finding food and caring for his sick parents is hoisted onto Lucas’ bony shoulders. At work, he discovers that machines, whether they are music boxes or sewing machines, have the uncanny desire and eventual power to suck their owners into themselves – they contain the dead. He hears Simon’s voice just behind his machine’s hypnotic creaking, and, the more he takes up his position behind its cogs and wheels, the more he feels the need to escape, though not alone. As befits a hero (and Lucas is a hero), there is someone to save; Catherine, Simon’s ex-fiancée, who Lucas believes is his only love and responsibility.
The second part of the novel shows present-day New York, where terrorist threats and racial issues are fairly commonplace. Cat Martin is a highly educated, middle-aged police officer, in charge of taking calls from, in her words, the “regular nuts” who announce that they are bombing a certain place or killing a certain person because of a wide variety of (often ridiculous) reasons. However, one of her callers, a little boy, actually followed through. He had a homemade bomb strapped to his chest, and, walking up to a stranger, hugged him, thereby detonating the bomb and killing both of them. The incident was a slap to Cat’s face because she had brushed that call aside, thinking it was not of any importance. Guilt-ridden, she received a call from another child several days later, asking if she had spoken to his “brother” and not divulging any information other than the fact that he wasn’t supposed to call and shouldn’t have. Despite their being able to trace the call, a second bomb went off by Central Park with the same details – crude bomb strapped to the chest and detonation by hugging a random passerby. Cat, who has not gotten over the recent death of her son and her failed marriage, is barely able to handle the physical and emotional strain of the recent happenings. Her boyfriend, perfect and dependable Simon, is now insufficient for the life she realizes she needs, which is to be away from the city that is gradually turning into a monstrosity.
The third and final part of Specimen Days is the New York of the future, where the city itself is a novelty and a thing of the past. Central Park is converted into a theme park, where foreigners pay to be harassed, mugged, etc., to get the complete New York experience, so to speak. Simon is a simulo – a robot endowed with almost all the human characteristics – and works as one of the park’s attractions. An unexplainable urge pushes Simon to desert his job and go to Denver to, again with the cliché, meet his maker along with a Nadian named Catareen, a creature with green skin and flame-colored eyes. Other than the mysterious pull, Simon has a lot of questions for the person who created him, the most pressing of which is why he feels that he is always “on the brink of something” and yet not getting there. For instance, he thinks he comprehends beauty and then discovers that it is merely a crude impression. Midway through their journey, they run into a child named Luke who prefers to join them rather than stay with a religious cult he had somehow ensnared himself with. This unlikely trio – a robot, an alien and a precocious child – sticks together through hunger, possible arrests and contaminated lake water, in the abstract hope that they find what it is they are looking for be it family, courage or love.
Aside from the city and the permutations of names, what binds Specimen Days together is the literal and underlying presence of Walt Whitman. The novel is named after one of Whitman's works, after all. Lucas, in the first part of the book, speaks in intermittent bursts of poetry, fits that are beyond his control. Leaves of Grass is his Bible, from which he reads a passage every night and recites as fittingly as a clairvoyant would. The child-bombers from the second part get their inspiration from Whitman’s principles and grew up in a house filled wall-to-wall with pages from his poetry. Finally, Simon the simulo is embedded with a Whitman poetry chip and cannot control his outbursts as well.
Specimen Days is beautifully and impeccably written. Cunningham’s language is haunting and although it seems odd that the book is romance, history and sci-fi all at the same time, it is seamless and requires so much effort to put down. It is definitely up to par with the Pulitzer Prize winning The Hours, and even more imaginative. There are a lot of wonderful books about poetry but those like Specimen Days are rare, in that they already are poetry. I cannot recommend this enough.
The story opens at the funeral of the lovely Molly Lane, one-time mistress to both longtime friends Clive, an influential classical composers, and Vernon, editor-in-chief of one of the country's leading dailies. Also at the funeral was another of Molly's former lovers, right-wing politician Julian Garmony, as well as Molly's husband, the rich publisher George Lane, for both of whom the friends held great contempt.
