Specimen Days

The author of THE HOURS has written a work that is actually three New York stories. Each uses the same characters but puts them indifferent eras: the 1890s, the present, and finally 150 years in the future. Narrator Alan Cumming has a fine voice tinged with an Irish brogue that comes in handy in the first story, which takes place on the Lower East Side. The problem, though, is that he reads much too fast, swallows some words, and becomes too excited during the exciting parts. If he would slow down, the book would flow better. The publisher also needs to let us know when we've come to the end of the CD, and what CD we're listening to. R.I.G. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Starred review from May 9, 2005
Engaging Walt Whitman as his muse (and borrowing the name of Whitman's 1882 autobiography for his title), Cunningham weaves a captivating, strange and extravagant novel of human progress and social decline. Like his Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hours
, the novel tells three stories separated in time. But here, the stage is the same (the "glittering, blighted" city of Manhattan), the actors mirror each other (a deformed, Whitman-quoting boy, Luke, is a terrorist in one story and a teenage prophet in another; a world-weary woman, Catherine, is a would-be bride and an alien; and a handsome young man, Simon, is a ghost, a business man and an artificial human) and weighty themes (of love and fear, loss and connection, violence and poetry) reverberate with increasing power. "In the Machine," set during the Industrial Revolution, tells the story of 12-year-old Luke as he falls in love with his dead brother's girlfriend, Catherine, and becomes convinced that the ghost of his brother, Simon, lives inside the iron works machine that killed him. The suspenseful "The Children's Crusade" explores love and maternal instinct via a thrilleresque plot, as Cat, a black forensic psychologist, draws away from her rich, white and younger lover, Simon, and toward a spooky, deformed boy who's also a member of a global network committed to random acts of terror. And in "Like Beauty," Simon, a "simulo"; Catareen, a lizard-like alien; and Luke, an adolescent prophet, strike out for a new life in a postapocalyptic world. With its narrative leaps and self-conscious flights into the transcendent, Cunningham's fourth novel sometimes seems ready to collapse under the weight of its lavishness and ambition—but thrillingly, it never does. This is daring, memorable fiction. Agent, Gail Hochman.

Narrator Alan Cummings manages to bring these three Walt Whitman-related stories to life with conviction and consistency--despite the centuries that separate the characters. A boy, guided by Whitman, hears his dead brother speaking through machines. Young suicide bombers, guided by a woman claiming to be Whitman, hug their victims before detonating. An android programmed with the poetry of Whitman seeks to escape Earth with a lizard-like alien. Cummings wisely focuses on the power of storytelling to keep the material--filled with Whitman symbology--cohesive. This is another bold work from author Michael Cunningham, who provided a similar homage to Virginia Woolf in THE HOURS. R.W.S. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine