Austinist Book Review: Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days

New York City is a central to the book, and yet much of the story revolves around getting out of the city itself. The first segment, In The Machine, takes place just before the turn of the century and involves a disfigured boy who has lost his older brother to a factory accident. Having to support his family, the boy, Lucas, takes his brother's old job, spending his days with the machine that killed his brother, Simon. Simon had left behind a fiance, Catherine, and Lucas feels a need to protect her. Lucas studies Whitman's Leaves of Grass like a Bible and he has a curious habit of spouting lines from the book as a way to express himself.

The next story, The Children's Crusade, centers around Cat, a forensic pyschologist who takes calls from the crazies calling into the New York Police Department. One oversight on her part may or may not have led to a suicide bombing. There is also a Simon in this story, and at least one Luke. These names probably carry some meaning, but we aren't sure what that might be - this is a blog entry, not an English paper, so give us a break.

The final story, Like Beauty, gives us a picture of New York - 150 years in the future. We aren't big science fiction fans so it isn't surprising that this was the part of the book we liked the least. There are androids and aliens and much of New York is one big theme park where rich Europeans pay to have a mugging experience. Simon is the main character in this one, then there is the lizard-like alien refugee, Catareen, and a small, deformed boy named Luke. They escape from New York and head West to Denver in a flying pod. Oh, did we mention that Simon, the android thing, has a habit of babbling Whitman lines as a way to express himself?

It might do a reader well to be familiar with Leaves of Grass, Whitman's greatest and best known collection. We aren't really that familiar. Surely we have read at least a few of the poems and we are literate enough to recognize those famous lines of his. Of course we have seen Dead Poet's Society and even reenacted the Oh Captain, My Captain scene for our favorite high school English teacher (seems so cheesy now!). And of course there is that song from Fame, I sing the Body Electric. We even once considered a dude our friend who told us he was distantly related to Whitman and that he and old Walt were the only redheads ever to exist among their geneology. Nice story.

But Specimen Days seems to be directly linked to Leaves of Grass in so many ways that we feel we might better understand the novel if we had taken that Whitman course in college, supposing one was offered and we had even stepped foot in the English building (we did not). At 19 and 20 years old we were more interested in studying the poetry of film, but we have always understood that someday we would be old and owners of a house full of books and we would sit down in a plush chair with our cup of tea and find magic in Byron and Shelley and Yeats and Keats and Whitman, of course Whitman. So here we are now reading Specimen Days and it is beautifully written, to be sure, and absorbing and, yes, good, but we don't quite get it.

Eh, it wouldn't be the first time.

Despite our many confusions we heartily recommend Specimen Days. Like any good work it sits with you, pokes at you, dares you to make sense of it. We expect that perhaps some night, as we are trying to fall asleep (perhaps when our hair is gray and our Whitman reading has gone underway) we will shout out an "A Ha!"

Perhaps.