If I had a nickel for every Michael Cunningham book centered around a straight couple more or less falling into codependent love with one partner’s manic-pixie-dream-gay-brother, I’d have at least three nickels —–- which isn’t a lot, but it’s still weird I’d have more than one, right? Perhaps this is why there’s a sort of ever-present sense of deja vu in Day, Cunningham’s latest novel (and first in almost a decade): it’s hard to read about the codependent relationship between sharp, unhappy Isabel, her washed-up rocker husband Dan, and Isabel’s charismatic gay brother, Robbie (who lives in their attic and is the primary love —–- although thankfully not lust —–- of both his sister and her husband), without getting flashbacks to the core trios in The Snow Queen and, especially, By Nightfall, which sees a husband in a dying marriage becoming infatuated with his wife’s charismatic gay brother, who is staying in their house.
Add Dan and Isabel’s kids into the equation (five-year-old Violet and ten-year-old Nathan, both of whom seem at least five years older than that), and you might see similarities to the three-adults-and-a-baby premise of A Home at the End of the World, in which a gay man, a bisexual man, and a straight woman raise a child together. Then there’s the novel’s eye-catching structure —–- it takes place over the course of three days (hence the title), each a year apart —–- which calls to mind The Hours, Cunningham’s most famous book, which also takes place on three separate single days in different years.
Given all these echoes of Cunningham’s previous works, the most immediately distinctive aspect of Day is its historical backdrop: the Covid-19 pandemic. But rather than honing in on the particularities of such an unprecedented moment, Day backgrounds it in favor of diving into the interiority of its characters, especially their shared discontentedness: life is not what they thought it would be. Perhaps, Day posits, the real pandemic was the middle-class, middle-aged disillusionment experienced along the way.
The issue is not that this theme isn’t prescient (it is) or interesting (it can be), but rather that it simply isn’t explored in a particularly original nor compelling way —–- the novel seems surprisingly uninterested in the wrenching, idiosyncratic anxieties of the Covid era, the promising “day” structure feels more like a gimmick than a necessary formal device, and any emotion evoked by Cunningham’s cast of homogeneously precocious, self-aware Brooklynites tends to get stifled by the protracted philosophical musings that inevitably follow. There is so much Day could have been, but that’s precisely what sinks it: Day is a gorgeously written book, but one that often feels suffocated by its awareness of its own potential.
Cunningham’s latest tells the story of a somewhat-extended family living through the onslaught of the pandemic and dealing with its consequences. There’s not much of a plot, so to speak, but there doesn’t need to be. It’s a series of snapshots into the minds and lives of a family, constantly jumping between the perspectives of each member, and generally more of an ensemble character study than anything else. We soon see that Isabel and Dan are falling out of love with one another (although remaining in love with Robbie, who remains in love with them), Robbie is struggling to find an apartment of his own as well as his purpose in life more generally, Nathan is entering into his teenage angst era (despite being ten), and Violet is struggling with her seemingly infinite knowledge of the intimate dissatisfactions of every one of her family members (despite, once again, being five). Actually, Violet isn’t the only character with an uncanny knack for psychoanalysis —–- the entire cast possesses a degree of self-awareness that is as eloquent as it is, frankly, unbelievable.
All of Day’s main cast suffer from the same disease —–- and no, I’m not talking about Covid. Every character is so perfect, so carefully constructed and methodically proven to be “three-dimensional,” that none of them feel quite human. It’s not that they’re without human flaws, but that even the way they approach their own insecurities feels impersonal, literary, and unrealistic. They all speak and talk so beautifully that no one has their own distinguishing voice; everyone just sounds like Michael Cunningham —–- and at times, feel less like people than they do vessels for Cunningham’s own musings. (Most obviously and amusingly, let’s just say Robbie and Isabel’s constant brooding about Instagram and its existentially baffling impersonality feels a little more like something you’d hear from a 71-year-old novelist than a 30-ish millennial.)
This results in a novel filled with elegant prose, every word carefully chosen to crystallize the mundane happenings into universal treatises on love and loss. It also results in a cast of characters who never feel particularly real —–- which is especially unfortunate for a book centered around interiority and character study —–- and, worse, who occasionally leap right across that uncanny valley of hyper-literariness and land squarely in the realm of almost unbearable pretentiousness. (When Isabel tells her real estate agent “I think we need to look at places that aren’t so haunted by their own unhaunted-ness, if you know what I mean,” it’s hard not to share the agent’s “baffled irritation.”)
Day is, perhaps, evidence that there is such a thing as too much interiority, or at least too much attempted depiction of it. Cunningham is so preoccupied with convincing audiences of the book’s nuances that nuance itself feels eradicated —–- he doesn’t give his characters any room to breathe, doesn’t leave any room for interpretation or open-ended-ness. It’s rather ironic, considering the fact that Cunningham himself writes (as Isabel, in the last section) that “words fail,” and that life is “better contained in gestures” than stretched thin with words – but in Day, no gesture is allowed to remain a gesture. Everything must be analyzed on the page.
To this end, one can almost sense a sort of nervous distrust woven into the foundation of the book, this feeling that Cunningham does not trust his audience to connect the dots he’s set out for them, or perhaps that he does not trust his own writing to make the impact he hopes it does. The characters’ running commentaries about their lives and those of their loved ones are characterized by this tendency towards omniscience, towards universalization, that makes these “introspections” feel more like authorial interpretation —–- like Cunningham himself seeping through the page to tell you what meaning you are to glean from it.
Just look at the casual uncle-niece interactions during the first “day”: Violet announces she’s going to her room to get a toy, and Robbie reflects on how she’s beginning to develop hints “of mortal wistfulness, the nascent fear of [one’s] own disappearance;” Violet doesn’t want to play with Legos, and Robbie mournfully wonders “How can the desires of another person, even at the age of five, be so opaque and unpredictable?” (And don’t think Violet gets a pass from eloquent introspection just because she’s an elementary schooler; here’s her rumination re: the fate of a recently deceased man later on in the book: “Now he’s a flurry of quickened air, outside a house he doesn’t recognize, but he is, in a way, turning more into himself, too.”)
The source of these philosophical reflections on the mysteries and magic of the quotidian surely lies in Cunningham’s own adoration for Virginia Woolf, which is well-known and well-documented —–- one needs look no further than The Hours, an ode to Woolf in both form and content. But Michael Cunningham is not Virginia Woolf —–- he’s his own writer, and a talented one at that. It’s a shame, then, that he spends most of Day playing to Woolf’s strengths rather than his own.
Woolf is uniquely capable of effortlessly sliding into the minds of her characters, spinning out reflections on the mundane that feel as natural and casual as they do poignant and universal. Cunningham, like most other writers who are not Virginia Woolf, never quite seems to figure out how to replicate this technique; his own depictions of interiority often feel somewhat forced and clunky, written in a tone perhaps best described as convinced of its own profundity, although that might be too harsh. But none of this means Cunningham isn’t a good writer —–- merely that this specific device does not come as naturally to him as it did for Woolf, just as he possesses certain skills that other writers (including Woolf!) might not.
Personally, I found Day to be its best at its most pared down —–- Cunningham has an innate gift for devastating one-liners, for the creation of scenarios so pregnant with meaning that they speak for themselves. That’s what I found so frustrating about Day: Cunningham will casually drop a mic-drop-worthy line, but then doesn’t drop the mic, moving straight past the power of the moment into a lengthy dissection of it. In the last section, a character says in an emotionally climactic moment, “You’ve tried so hard to be in love with me,” a heartbreaking ten words that the recipient doesn’t know how to respond to, so they don’t. I wanted to pause here, relish in everything said and, most importantly, everything unsaid between them. Instead, the text jumps into a theoretical soliloquy about when it becomes “too late” to fix things —–- a good paragraph, but one that saps the immense strength of the lines preceding it.
Similarly, Cunningham excels at highlighting the tiny moments that carve cracks into his characters’ hearts: a father’s realization that his son has started to purposefully walk a few paces in front of him (rather than beside him) on the way to school, a wife’s observation that she and her husband sitting next to each other feels like little more than strangers “waiting for the same train.” We don’t need pages speculating on the existential threats each of these moments pose; the existential threat has already been made painfully clear due to the strength of the original depiction, and at least for this reader, the more it is reiterated, the less power it holds. There is so much in Day that feels incisive about the human condition; it’s just so frequently covered up with elaborate attempts to prove it’s there.
Day is airtight, and that’s a critique as much as it is a compliment, because there is nothing these characters, their world, and perhaps Cunningham himself, could have benefited from more than a chance to breathe. So while the book may not address the pandemic directly, the pervasive sense of suffocation that defined those months of isolation in 2020 does play a key role in Day —–- in the narrative, yes, but more importantly and regrettably, in Cunningham’s execution of it.