Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days: Tenderness

Right now, I’m rereading Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, one of my favorite books, because it is full of tenderness for human beings. The novel is honest about the characters’ flaws, cruelties, and deceptions, but Cunningham is also unafraid to focus on showing what is possible in our capacities for love and sacrifice. The very best way to read this book is not to look at the flap copy or reviews or anything else that will give away its project. I mean, you can of course. It is still pure delight after multiple rereadings. But I’m not going to be the culprit in spoiling Cunningham’s delicious surprises. So all I’ll say is that it’s three storylines, not intertwined as in its predecessor The Hours, but connected very differently.

Here’s the beginning of the first section, “In the Machine” (I’m including a series of marvelous paragraphs, the entire first scene):   

Walt said that the dead turned into grass, but there was no grass where they’d buried Simon. He was with the other Irish on the far side of the river, where it was only dirt and gravel and names on stones.

Catherine believed Simon had gone to heaven. She had a locket with his picture and a bit of his hair inside.

“Heaven’s the place for him,” she said. “He was too good for this world.” She looked uncertainly out the parlor window and into the street, as if she expected a glittering carriage to wheel along with Simon on board, serene in his heedless milk-white beauty, waving and grinning, going gladly to the place where he had always belonged.

“If you think so,” Lucas answered. Catherine fingered the locket. Her hands were tapered and precise. She could sew stitches too fine to see. 

“And yet he’s with us still,” she said. “Don’t you feel it?” She worried the locket chain as if it were a rosary.

“I suppose so,” Lucas said. Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn’t expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with. 

The guests had departed, and Lucas’s father and mother had gone to bed. It was only Lucas and Catherine in the parlor, with what had been left behind. Empty plates, the rind of a ham. The ham had been meant for Catherine’s and Simon’s wedding. It was lucky, then, to have it for the wake instead.

Lucas said, “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.”

He hadn’t meant to speak as the book. He never did, but when he was excited he couldn’t help himself.

She said, “Oh, Lucas.”

His heart fluttered and thumped against the bone.

“I worry for you,” she said. “You’re so young.”

“I’m almost thirteen,” he said.

“It’s a terrible place. It’s such hard work.”

“I’m lucky. It’s a kindness of them, to give me Simon’s job.”

“And no more school.”

“I don’t need school. I have Walt’s book.”

“You know the whole thing, don’t you?”

“Oh no. There’s much more, it will take me years.”

“You must be careful at the works,” she said. “You must--” She stopped speaking, though her face didn’t change. She continued offering her profile, which was as gravely beautiful as that of a woman on a coin. She continued looking out at the street below, waiting for the heavenly entourage to parade by with Simon up top, the pride of the family, a new prince of the dead.

Lucas said, “You must be careful, too.”

“There’s nothing for me to be careful about, my dear. For me it’s just tomorrow and the next day.”

She slipped the locket chain back over her head. The locket vanished into her dress. Lucas wanted to tell her--what? He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold, like stars; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance. He needed to tell her it was impossible, it was unbearable, to be so continually mistaken for a misshapen boy with a walleye and a pumpkin head and a habit of speaking in fits.

He said, “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume.” It was not what he’d hoped to tell her.

She smiled. At least she wasn’t angry with him. She said, “I should go now. Will you walk me home?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

It’s a portrait of love and bravery and a passion for poetry. We begin with Walt Whitman and the death of an unknown character. It’s a time and place where the Irish have to be buried on the other side of the river, where a vision of heaven is “a glittering carriage to wheel along with Simon on board, serene in his heedless milk-white beauty, waving and grinning, going gladly to the place where he had always belonged.” This is a heaven of riches, beauty, power, and blessings, a heaven in which the favored boy knows that riches, beauty, power, and blessings belong to him by right. 

But this is Lucas’s story, an unsettling and endearing child about to take over his brother’s dangerous job because the family has no choice. He doesn’t show up by name until paragraph four, though—he’s not thinking about himself, but about Whitman, Simon, and Catherine. He can’t tell her he loves her: when he’s moved, he can only speak “as the book.” He’s ambivalent about, and maybe jealous of, Simon, but he’s not expressing this to Catherine. He can’t. In his mind it’s all poetry, Walt’s poetry, and, by the end of this short scene, his own.

Catherine sees Simon, who was beautiful, as “too good for this world.” Lucas, like his hero, Whitman, loves the broken and vulnerable, the whole world, the one particular human being. This wild and misunderstood thirteen-year-old sees more than anyone around him and loves it all the same.

 In “You,” Whitman wrote,

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

The poem continues—I’ve linked to it above. A reminder of what beauty might still be here in the middle of all our fears, our losses, our suspicions, our suffering, our grief.

About his newest novel, Day, Cunningham talked about writing in desperate times in a conversation with Elliott Holt (it applied to the early lockdown days of the pandemic and applies to our moment now when every day brings wild changes. It also seems to me to relate to the kind of freedom and play he allows himself in Specimen Days, no matter how hard the circumstances the characters face): 

How do you write a novel—which is, in a sense, a projectile shot into the future—when it starts looking like there may not be a future at all? 

The answer, of course: all novels are gambles of one kind or another. If an era of particularly dim prospects stops us from creating anything at all, we’re that much more deeply in trouble. Still, I admit that I paused over it, over whether or not a new novel meant anything, in the face of actual annihilation. Then I got over it and got back to work.

There’s a truncation in “Then I got over it”—it may have taken him a while, or not; it may take us a while, or not. 

But as always with Cunningham, I find comfort, and so, this month, I wanted to share that with you, my fellow readers.  

Writing and Teaching

Having finished my copyedits for Marriage to the Sea and then my newest draft of the book that follows, I’m immersed in teaching a really great group of novelists for my winter term. I’m in favor, always, of taking and teaching classes, of informal writer’s groups, co-writing if that works for you. It’s a good thing to be surprised and delighted and to engage with people in problem-solving, thinking about how narratives work, reading and writing together.

I’m also looking forward very much to teaching a session for the Off Campus Writer’s Workshop. It’s on the question of what lies beyond simple unreliability, a subject I’ve tackled before, in lecture and essay, but our ideas keep evolving, of course. Right now, I’m thinking a lot about lying, telling the truth, deception, denial, and the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves and about each other. And how all of this not only shows up in our characters but in our narrative approach. This class is open for anyone who wants to register, so if you’d like to be part of our conversation, the link is above. And, in any case, for writers looking for inspiration, you might check out OCWW: they have all kinds of great sessions.

I’m also reading some beautiful forthcoming and recent books by friends, in between peering at the news and trying to figure out my small role in all that’s happening (including being counted as objecting to some particularly bad goings-on, which counts when enough of us are doing it: https://5calls.org/).

MPP Contributor news

Joan Silber wrote about her teacher Grace Paley for the MPP (Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"). She has a story in the Winter 2025 issue of Ploughshares, which has made the story free to nonsubscribers. I recommend buying the issue, though, if you can, because it has great work in it, including a new story, “Ghost,” by Charles Baxter (Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding—he was writing at the time that The Sun Collective came out, and before his wild new Blood Test). Here’s the beginning of Joan’s new story, “Mercy,” in Ploughshares (her new book, Mercy, will be coming out this fall):

What they did to Eddie the night he overdosed was put tubes up his nose and needles in both arms and then roll him into a room in the hospital where machines made dull roaring noises, and he had to hear the hissing inhalations from other bodies in other beds. It was not even quiet. It wasn’t at all where he wanted to die, and he tried to say this, but his mouth was taped over a tube. Get me out of here came out as Emmeowee, and Home was just a call like a bird’s. 

He’d gotten it all wrong, what dying would be. The poetry of it was not in this room. Why wasn’t he alone? The sanctity of this time was clogged with strangers. He was next to the private gasps of other men, their muffled animal efforts. All men. He loved women—why hadn’t they at least put him with women? 

He had no way to open his eyes to see, and he didn’t want to see. They were a mess, all of them. He knew that much. He was past the strength to look. The dark was fine with him. 

And then he remembered he was supposed to be kinder. Weren’t they all in this together? All of them as fucked up as he was. Worse. He could hear how hard they were working for air, poor bastards, with lungs no good at it. Working, working. Did that mean he was really dying, if his mind could remind itself to make room for mercy? It frightened him to think so. And then it didn’t.

Wishing some mercy for all of you in this coming month. Thank you for reading, whether you’ve just joined the project or have been here for a while. I appreciate being together in our imaginations in this time.