I bought Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham quite a while ago without really knowing what it was about or what to expect. As I started reading, I felt strangely like I was hovering above the characters watching them go about their lives. The use of Walt Whitman's work to weave these three stories set in different times together intrigued me and kept me wondering where Cunningham was going. As I read what in many ways felt like three novellas tied together by some common elements I couldn't help but think about the remnants we leave behind as we travel through life, remnants that might mean the world to us and nothing to someone else or might feel like nothing to us but change someone else's life. Cunningham's characters aren't all necessarily likable but they are engaging and even relatable in an uncomfortable way that seems to bring to mind some of the less desirable aspects of one's self as one wonders what one would do in similar circumstances. Specimen Days draws distinct parallels between the things we choose to see and the things we choose not to see as we go about our daily lives. In the three story lines, which almost feel like they have an air of reincarnation about them, Specimen Days puts human interaction - really all interaction between beings - under a microscope to examine if we really know ourselves and others as well as we think they do and even seems to question our view of life itself. ( )

2021 reread. Still my favorite. ( )

Okay, Cunningham can write, certainly: he has stylistic skills, knows how to portray believable characters and can compose interesting stories with them, often with literary references (cf. The Hours and Virginia Woolf). He also shows this in this book, which consists of three parts. The first has a quite explicit Dickensian slant, the second is in line with the best psychological thrillers, and the third with the most fascinating material from the dystopian science fiction world. Cunningham also makes some connections between the three stories, although they take place in three time periods: silly links such as a bowl that suddenly appears in each of the stories (it is not clear to me why), intriguing ones such as names of characters that return (Simon, Luke, Catherine), and the like. At the beginning of the book, Cunningham included a quote from Walt Whitman, the personification of exuberant American individualism, which hints that people always struggle with the same feelings regardless of new times. Is this the unifying theme? By the way, Whitman constantly returns in the stories, almost always in the form of quotes, turning him into a gimmick. Did Cunningham want to illustrate with this book that time and place don't matter in human lifes, and that everyone (even a ‘humanised robot’) actually just wants the same thing: a little security and happiness? At the risk of sounding harsh: isn’t that a bit cheesy? I don't know, this novel didn't convince me. ( )

Not bad but a little strange. I was expecting more about Walt Whitman, but he is quoted a lot. ( )

I think reading this book in spurts was a disservice. All three "stories" within the novel are interconnected, but it is hard to evaluate the novel as a whole because the three sections seem almost more like individual novellas. All three stories have three main characters (who share names, but shift their roles as protagonists/antagonists and their characterizations: Simon, Catherine/Cat/Catareen, Lucas/Luke) and Walt Whitman's poetry (and occasionally the poet himself) features in all three stories.

Of the three, "In the Machine" resonated the most, but I suspect that was because it was the first and I had no concept of the book as a whole. Cunningham vividly evokes the New York sidewalks and factories of yesteryear, with meaningful experiences of the underserved and outcast woven into a pseudo-ghost story.

The middle section, "The Children's Crusade," shifts to a more recent present, with a gritty protagonist whose choices, however, are less convincing than those of "In the Machine". The final offering, "Like Beauty," is an indulgent shift into sci-fi dystopia land, which ends up being a good read with an edge, but left me wanting the backstory that might have been included if it had been an entire novel.

Some have criticized the work as being too similar to Cunningham's The Hours in its use of Virginia Woolf. I can't comment on that, but I will say that the use of Whitman didn't always pack the same level of punch across the three stories. I found the Whitman quotes most compelling and interesting in the "The Children's Crusade" where as they seemed more of an annoyance in the other two.

It probably deserves a more concentrated re-read from me, because I'm sure I missed interconnections and allegories. On the other hand, I enjoyed reading each section as a self-contained story, even if Cunningham's genre experimentation was not consistently convincing ( )