"Day," by Michael Cunningham

Widely published and respected author Michael Cunningham is best known for his prizewinning 1998 novel "The Hours," which is divided into three parts, all related to Virginia Woolf, her novel "Mrs. Dalloway," and her suicide by drowning. One part of the book focuses on Woolf, the other two on other main characters in other time periods, but all are related somehow to Woolf and "Mrs. Dalloway." As someone who has read much of Woolf's work, in some cases multiple times, and treasures her writings, I was of course drawn to "The Hours" when it came out twenty-five years ago and completely swept up in it. I have just read Cunningham's new novel, "Day" (Random House, 2023), which displays multiple stylistic and thematic connections to "The Hours." "Day" too is divided into three parts, in this case into three days, exactly a year apart in each case: April 5th of 2019, 2020, and 2021. Readers will note that these were years just before, during the worst of, and during the partial easing of the COVID pandemic. The focus is on one family and their connections. Married couple Isabel and Dan, their young children Nathan and Violet, Isabel's brother Robbie, Dan's brother Garth, and Chess, who is the mother of Garth's very young child Odin, are the main characters, and their complicated relationships with each other form the spine of the novel. In particular, and this is a somewhat uncommon focus in fiction, there is much attention to the intensely close but also extremely fraught relationships of the sibling pairs: Isabel and Robbie, Dan and Garth, and Nathan and Violet. There are of course additional characters: friends, employers, lovers, former lovers, and more. Because of the setting during the pandemic years, there are also themes of confinement and isolation, and minute-to-minute densely described slivers of time. The structure of three days, three different years, also supplies a striking distillation of the events, evolutions, and dissolutions portrayed in the story. The writing is gorgeous, perhaps a bit ornate and even precious in places, but spellbinding. Often while reading "Day" I was struck by the author's insights, which made me pause and go back and read them again. For just one example, a description of 17-month old baby Odin's love of habit and repetition causes his mother Chess to be "able to share his attachment to repetition, which resembles the chants of monks and nuns, reciting their devotions so unvaryingly that devotion becomes an involuntary bodily function, like breath and heartbeat" (p. 142). Returning to the connections with Cunningham's earlier novel, "The Hours," and to the references in that book to Virginia Woolf already mentioned above: there are other allusions to Woolf and her work in this book. For example, siblings Isobel and Robbie write social posts in the voice of an imaginary friend of theirs, Wolfe. An actual wolf is also mentioned. And one character's behavior at one point seems to echo Virginia Woolf's behavior, although with a different result. (I don't want to give away plot points.) There is also something about the quality of the language, of the descriptions, that is reminiscent of Woolf's writing. A related noticeable attribute of this novel is the way Cunningham understands and takes seriously the inner lives of children. And, like "The Hours," "The Day" is driven by a sense of time and its effects. This fascinating although sometimes unsettling novel is full of broken and yet somehow resilient characters, doing their best to muddle through the pandemic and through all the difficult times in life, all with their own struggles and their own coping mechanisms. Like all good fiction, "Day" is ultimately a study of human nature, with both its individual quirks and its universalities.