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Day
As the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious—and learning to go on—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours
April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.
April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.
April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.
From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.
April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.
April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.
April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.
From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.
273 pages, Hardcover
First published November 14, 2023
About the author
Michael Cunningham
91 books3,798 followersMichael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award & Pulitzer Prize), Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the non-fiction book, Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. His new novel, The Snow Queen, will be published in May of 2014. He lives in New York, and teaches at Yale University.
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December 16, 2023There is such beauty here, and so many passages and pages that felt, as I read them, as if I were listening to the most perfect music, but on the other hand I never could imagine that the people in this novel were more than pretty constructs.
Here is what I mean.
Robbie's in love with Isabel and Dan, too. Or rather, he's in love with the restively joined singular creature they've become: Isabel's briskly knowing melancholia conjoined with Dan's unembarrassed optimism; her inner jumble of thwarted desires and his earnest if unreasonable expectations. Robbie's in love with the person they've created together--someone romantic, someone generous of heart, someone kind and gentle but wised-up and ironic, as well.
I personally just can't be persuaded that Robbie is thinking these things as he considers his relationships with his sister and his brother-in-law, but over and over again the book asks me to believe that people spend their lives deeply thinking about their relationships, and their interconnectedness with others, and that they seek constantly to define these relationships--that this is why we live.
All right. Maybe I can be persuaded that Robbie thinks he's in love with both his sister and his brother-in-law. Not really, though. And then: this passage asks so much more of me, to believe in the idea that Robbie goes on to think of the three of them together, as one being, a being that contains such particularities as his sister's "briskly knowing melancholia" (what is briskly knowing melancholia, anyway, I challenge you to tell me) combined with Dan's "unembarrassed optimism" (since when can 'optimism' be 'embarrassed?'), and well, after a while I was too exhausted to let this kind of writing ride.
The book is written on this level of intense self-awareness. No one ever just throws trash on the ground or drinks a warm beer because they forgot to put the six-pack in the fridge the night before. I either need to treat passages like this one as pretty, but inconsequential words, or I need to believe that these characters are having these intense kinds of thoughts all the time, these self-aware and self-absorbed thoughts, about how they feel and how they relate to every other character in the book.
The words were continuously and breathtakingly beautiful, but they didn't satisfy, because I wanted the words to matter more than they did.
Here is what I mean.
Robbie's in love with Isabel and Dan, too. Or rather, he's in love with the restively joined singular creature they've become: Isabel's briskly knowing melancholia conjoined with Dan's unembarrassed optimism; her inner jumble of thwarted desires and his earnest if unreasonable expectations. Robbie's in love with the person they've created together--someone romantic, someone generous of heart, someone kind and gentle but wised-up and ironic, as well.
I personally just can't be persuaded that Robbie is thinking these things as he considers his relationships with his sister and his brother-in-law, but over and over again the book asks me to believe that people spend their lives deeply thinking about their relationships, and their interconnectedness with others, and that they seek constantly to define these relationships--that this is why we live.
All right. Maybe I can be persuaded that Robbie thinks he's in love with both his sister and his brother-in-law. Not really, though. And then: this passage asks so much more of me, to believe in the idea that Robbie goes on to think of the three of them together, as one being, a being that contains such particularities as his sister's "briskly knowing melancholia" (what is briskly knowing melancholia, anyway, I challenge you to tell me) combined with Dan's "unembarrassed optimism" (since when can 'optimism' be 'embarrassed?'), and well, after a while I was too exhausted to let this kind of writing ride.
The book is written on this level of intense self-awareness. No one ever just throws trash on the ground or drinks a warm beer because they forgot to put the six-pack in the fridge the night before. I either need to treat passages like this one as pretty, but inconsequential words, or I need to believe that these characters are having these intense kinds of thoughts all the time, these self-aware and self-absorbed thoughts, about how they feel and how they relate to every other character in the book.
The words were continuously and breathtakingly beautiful, but they didn't satisfy, because I wanted the words to matter more than they did.
November 15, 2023
The only problem with Michael Cunningham’s prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals’ work. He is the most elegant writer in America.
Admittedly, elegance doesn’t carry much cachet these days when Important Novels are supposed to make strident social arguments that we already agree with. But in the presence of truly beautiful writing, a kind of magic vibrates off the page.
That’s the aura of Cunningham’s pensive new novel, “Day.” He has developed a style calibrated to capture moments of ineffable longing. The opening scene, sunrise in New York, dawns like a poem about the city on the threshold of life. This is storytelling for TV only if you mean Tableau Vivant.
A confirmed trinitarian, at least in the literary sense, Cunningham has returned again to the triptych structure he explored in “Specimen Days” and “The Hours,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. The three sections of “Day” take place during three consecutive years — 2019, 2020 and 2021 — always on April 5.
From that time period, you may already have surmised that “Day” is another variant on the covid narrative, which at this point feels as fresh as a tattered N95 mask in the glove compartment. But the virus, which Cunningham never explicitly mentions, is not the subject of “Day”; it’s the setting, an implacable condition that enforces containment and stasis on people desperate to. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
Admittedly, elegance doesn’t carry much cachet these days when Important Novels are supposed to make strident social arguments that we already agree with. But in the presence of truly beautiful writing, a kind of magic vibrates off the page.
That’s the aura of Cunningham’s pensive new novel, “Day.” He has developed a style calibrated to capture moments of ineffable longing. The opening scene, sunrise in New York, dawns like a poem about the city on the threshold of life. This is storytelling for TV only if you mean Tableau Vivant.
A confirmed trinitarian, at least in the literary sense, Cunningham has returned again to the triptych structure he explored in “Specimen Days” and “The Hours,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. The three sections of “Day” take place during three consecutive years — 2019, 2020 and 2021 — always on April 5.
From that time period, you may already have surmised that “Day” is another variant on the covid narrative, which at this point feels as fresh as a tattered N95 mask in the glove compartment. But the virus, which Cunningham never explicitly mentions, is not the subject of “Day”; it’s the setting, an implacable condition that enforces containment and stasis on people desperate to. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
September 26, 2023
Somehow, I have managed to miss reading out on any of Michael Cunningham’s previous books. So, I was thrilled to get an ARC of Day. It’s an interesting concept, taking place on April 5th of 2019, 2020 and 2021. It covers the same family of brother, sister, her husband and their two young children, his brother and baby momma. Cunningham takes a microscope to the intimate lives of each of these five adults and two children, capturing their nuances. The adults are all dissatisfied with their lives, even before the pandemic. The men, in particular, didn’t seem to have their act together. While I loved the writing, I struggled with these whiny people, most of whom are all somewhat in love with each other. I just couldn’t come to care for them.
At times, Cunningham hits the nail on the head with an observation. “Relations with the parents of your kids’ friends can be like those of rival dukes and duchesses, forced into civility solely because you belong to the same ruling class.” And at other times, I just was like, what? I just could not imagine a mother writing a letter to her daughter to be read 15 years in the future, spelling out all these issues, like how much weight she’s gained during the lockdown and how white people shouldn’t wear the color yellow. And Violet never seemed like a real little girl. Some of these folks seem to be living in parallel universes, their inability to recognize what the others are feeling/thinking drove me to distraction. How could they be so dense?
I did like that Cunningham focuses on a single day each year. It enables him to show the myriad changes that occur in their lives without having to detail each and every one. He totally got the other worldliness of the pandemic, when life was so totally uprooted. But overall, I was left with a feeling of dissatisfaction.
My thanks to Netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.
At times, Cunningham hits the nail on the head with an observation. “Relations with the parents of your kids’ friends can be like those of rival dukes and duchesses, forced into civility solely because you belong to the same ruling class.” And at other times, I just was like, what? I just could not imagine a mother writing a letter to her daughter to be read 15 years in the future, spelling out all these issues, like how much weight she’s gained during the lockdown and how white people shouldn’t wear the color yellow. And Violet never seemed like a real little girl. Some of these folks seem to be living in parallel universes, their inability to recognize what the others are feeling/thinking drove me to distraction. How could they be so dense?
I did like that Cunningham focuses on a single day each year. It enables him to show the myriad changes that occur in their lives without having to detail each and every one. He totally got the other worldliness of the pandemic, when life was so totally uprooted. But overall, I was left with a feeling of dissatisfaction.
My thanks to Netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.
May 9, 2024
Humans failing versus their own standards and dreams, all the while following their own ways of escapism to deal with life. The characters have a lot of interiority but aren't fully engaging mid 30-year old upper-class white New Yorkers
They have always been improvising, all three adults
Morning, noon, evening on the same day (5 April) 2019, 2020 and 2021. The platonic three-way between aan brother, sister and husband is familiar Michael Cunningham, the writing is impeccable and crystalline, with the dialogue being witty and cutting at times, but overall I wasn't overly amazed by Day due to the blandness (for lack of more articulate term) of the three main characters.
The whole thing that these people would have children but are also massively invested into a fake instagram profile (Instagram after all exists outside the space time continuum) and worrying about wearing eyeshadow is interesting, and takes me out of seeing them as real.
We have Robbie, the sad teacher aka 30ish single homosexual brother (He needs his deeper optimism to remain intact) who doesn’t have abs (and hence is shut out of the biological aristocracy) but at least is acutely aware that his relationship with the married couple, consisting of his sister Isabel and Dan is not completely normal and not just rooted in an extreme housing market in New York.
Dan still misses his rockstar life, Isabel wants to divorce and seems to be in a bit of a mid life crisis with her advertising job. Violet and Nathan, the kids are well drawn and vying for the attention of her mother. Isabel is interesting, with her having white lady problems (and realising that she is very privileged) but still living through them so profoundly she ends up crying on the subway.
Cunningham can definitely write, and over the course of the days he describes we get crystalline, detailled, considered commentary on semi-rich white people in New York. But I as reader kept wondering why to be invested in that subject matter, which is already so often the focus of literary fiction. Kids called Odin, brotherly competition, people trying to "reclaim themselves" at the midpoint of their life, the complexity and duality of family relationships.
It's good but not revolutionary.
Wanting to divorce during the pandemic and having two school age kids is very tough, but still we don’t really get to feeling empathy for Isabel and Dan. And being stranded in Iceland in the pandemic, well that is not a seemingly bad outcome worth documenting perse.
Garth (brother of Dan), Chess and Odin are rather superfluous to the narrative in my view and besides the touching letters to (future) children by parents, and the ending of the book in general, I felt more an observer than someone really fully drawn into a narrative.
Quotes:
He can only hope he is able to survive his life
She respect him, up to a point
The world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring life
I was a pretty boy
I think I could heal people, I like to try
I shouldn’t say what I want to say
If he has learned nothing else he has learned an artist is someone who refuses to listen to reason
They have always been improvising, all three adults
Morning, noon, evening on the same day (5 April) 2019, 2020 and 2021. The platonic three-way between aan brother, sister and husband is familiar Michael Cunningham, the writing is impeccable and crystalline, with the dialogue being witty and cutting at times, but overall I wasn't overly amazed by Day due to the blandness (for lack of more articulate term) of the three main characters.
The whole thing that these people would have children but are also massively invested into a fake instagram profile (Instagram after all exists outside the space time continuum) and worrying about wearing eyeshadow is interesting, and takes me out of seeing them as real.
We have Robbie, the sad teacher aka 30ish single homosexual brother (He needs his deeper optimism to remain intact) who doesn’t have abs (and hence is shut out of the biological aristocracy) but at least is acutely aware that his relationship with the married couple, consisting of his sister Isabel and Dan is not completely normal and not just rooted in an extreme housing market in New York.
Dan still misses his rockstar life, Isabel wants to divorce and seems to be in a bit of a mid life crisis with her advertising job. Violet and Nathan, the kids are well drawn and vying for the attention of her mother. Isabel is interesting, with her having white lady problems (and realising that she is very privileged) but still living through them so profoundly she ends up crying on the subway.
Cunningham can definitely write, and over the course of the days he describes we get crystalline, detailled, considered commentary on semi-rich white people in New York. But I as reader kept wondering why to be invested in that subject matter, which is already so often the focus of literary fiction. Kids called Odin, brotherly competition, people trying to "reclaim themselves" at the midpoint of their life, the complexity and duality of family relationships.
It's good but not revolutionary.
Wanting to divorce during the pandemic and having two school age kids is very tough, but still we don’t really get to feeling empathy for Isabel and Dan. And being stranded in Iceland in the pandemic, well that is not a seemingly bad outcome worth documenting perse.
Garth (brother of Dan), Chess and Odin are rather superfluous to the narrative in my view and besides the touching letters to (future) children by parents, and the ending of the book in general, I felt more an observer than someone really fully drawn into a narrative.
Quotes:
He can only hope he is able to survive his life
She respect him, up to a point
The world of heterosexuals is a sick and boring life
I was a pretty boy
I think I could heal people, I like to try
I shouldn’t say what I want to say
If he has learned nothing else he has learned an artist is someone who refuses to listen to reason
May 7, 2023
Michael Cunningham gave us that rare sort of family story that feels intimate instead of epic.
With outstanding characterization and gorgeous descriptive prose…….I’m feeling a little drugged——so enamored with Cunningham’s gentle prose and honesty in the telling of this compelling story.
He chooses his words “judiciously”….showing great thought in everything he writes—from the characters he’s created - (they come so endearingly alive) - to his descriptions, dialogue, and even his love for nature shines through this story.
At times I stopped reading just to absorb the elegance of his sentences — or to contemplate the elegy to relationships….the impact each character has on the others.
The pure beauty, humanity, fragility, and simplicity from one of our finest American writers……”Day” has the right spice of complexity.
Love, loss, hope, grief, challenges, choices, decisions, good intentions—hurdles to face, deal, and overcome. The character’s inner turmoil impediments are realistically human — painful — yet mostly manageable in the way life is for all of us.
Cunningham can set a scene with such authority and capacity to create mood — its inescapable. I found myself shaking my head in wonder …..clamoring to digest the depth of genuineness.
Even the humor is written with mastery…..
I CANNOT SAY ENOUGH about the level of literary- excellence — the beautiful prose was a deep pleasure to read — it made me want to cry. I did get teary in one scene…..
“DAY” was exactly the book I have been craving for some time.
The days in “Day” take place on April 5th….in 2019, 2020, and 2021…..(modern & contemporary setting).
WITH NO MAJOR SPOILERS….
I’ll attempt to leave a few tempting teasers…. YOU DO WANT TO READ THIS BOOK!!!!
Beginning in Brooklyn,
Dan and Isabel are a married couple with two young children….Nathan (10) and Violet. (5).
Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie lives with them. (in the attic). His schoolteacher salary doesn’t leave Robbie with much other rent choices.
Robbie teaches history to middle school children. He recently had a breakup with his boyfriend Oliver. (wonders if he should try getting back with him).
He turned down acceptances to medical school. (wonders if it was a mistake);
He is home for the day because the school where he teaches is closed for asbestos testing. He has papers to grade.
Isabel walks into the kitchen:
“Good morning, Isabell says”.
“Here it is. Morning”.
“How are the Columbus essays going?”
“So far, there are six who think of him as a vicious invader, three, who think he invaded America, and that that was a good idea. One from a kid who seems to think the assignment was about what Columbus was wearing”.
“What was he wearing?”
“Some kind of robe. And what sounds like a tiara on his head”.
“Nice”.
“It is. And yet”.
“And yet”.
“Isabell punches Robbie’s shoulder, playfully, as she has been doing since . . . he can’t remember a time she wasn’t doing it. It is, has always been, a comradely gesture, but it is (has always been) delivered with sufficient force to be fleetingly painful, to suggest that camaraderie can contain an implication of rage”.
NOTE…..
Robbie is a very cool Uncle Robbie. The kids loved him. Isabel loved him. Dan loved him. I loved him. You’ll love him.
Dan was once a stoned, rocker, sweating, shirtless— the guy, Dan had expected, years ago, to turn into again, effortlessly, after he gave up his music for a year, maybe two, to be home with his newborn son.
Dan did his best to atone. He went into rehab, for the coke and the drinking and the few pharmaceuticals that he had never mentioned to anyone. He broke up his band, stop writing music altogether. He volunteered to be a househusband for a while so that Isabel could devote herself to her own career.
Dan wanted to resuscitate his music career (that never quite existed) which everyone knows, but Dan.
Five-year-old, Violet was often caught in an impossible position. (the adorable precious child)…..her young predicament had to do with ‘needing-to-be-right’ (she was incredibly observant), ……yet she also needed to have the mysterious world explained to her too.
Violet’s underlying worry was that if she was absent from any room, any event, for too long, the world would forget about her.
Uncle Robbie who was great with both kids wondered:
“How is it possible that a five-year-old girl is already developing a hint of mortal wistfulness, the nascent fear of her own disappearance?”
Nathan — (leave me alone Nathan) — was interested in autonomy…freedom from family expectations and obligations: he just wanted to hang out with his school buddies—distant himself from strife he suspected between his parents.
“Robbie and Dan know they’ve become the central couple. Isabell is, increasingly, a dream they’re having. They both know it. Robbie and Dan are the ones whose union is thriving, the ones who minister to each other, who are raising children together, who juggle the tasks, who want to know each to the other, if they’re all right, relatively speaking”.
So……relatively speaking…..
Robbie wonders if he, Isabell, and Dan are betraying the kids by keeping it a secret that he is moving out of their house soon.
A fundamental question:
Were the adults protecting the children or were they sowing the seeds of what might prove to be a lifetime of mistrust?”
During the lockdown— Robbie was in Iceland (the letters made me cry)…..His ‘aloneness’ …..‘isolation’ …. ‘uncertainty’ ….were reminders of how life, society, and the world had been turned upside down….
…..the increased incidence of psychosocial problems worsening — not even children and adolescents were able to escape the fears.
Michael Cunningham is one of our foremost writers of our generation—-and “Day” is filled with frictions between goodness and kindness, forgiveness and forgetting…yellow dresses….and moving forward.
With outstanding characterization and gorgeous descriptive prose…….I’m feeling a little drugged——so enamored with Cunningham’s gentle prose and honesty in the telling of this compelling story.
He chooses his words “judiciously”….showing great thought in everything he writes—from the characters he’s created - (they come so endearingly alive) - to his descriptions, dialogue, and even his love for nature shines through this story.
At times I stopped reading just to absorb the elegance of his sentences — or to contemplate the elegy to relationships….the impact each character has on the others.
The pure beauty, humanity, fragility, and simplicity from one of our finest American writers……”Day” has the right spice of complexity.
Love, loss, hope, grief, challenges, choices, decisions, good intentions—hurdles to face, deal, and overcome. The character’s inner turmoil impediments are realistically human — painful — yet mostly manageable in the way life is for all of us.
Cunningham can set a scene with such authority and capacity to create mood — its inescapable. I found myself shaking my head in wonder …..clamoring to digest the depth of genuineness.
Even the humor is written with mastery…..
I CANNOT SAY ENOUGH about the level of literary- excellence — the beautiful prose was a deep pleasure to read — it made me want to cry. I did get teary in one scene…..
“DAY” was exactly the book I have been craving for some time.
The days in “Day” take place on April 5th….in 2019, 2020, and 2021…..(modern & contemporary setting).
WITH NO MAJOR SPOILERS….
I’ll attempt to leave a few tempting teasers…. YOU DO WANT TO READ THIS BOOK!!!!
Beginning in Brooklyn,
Dan and Isabel are a married couple with two young children….Nathan (10) and Violet. (5).
Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie lives with them. (in the attic). His schoolteacher salary doesn’t leave Robbie with much other rent choices.
Robbie teaches history to middle school children. He recently had a breakup with his boyfriend Oliver. (wonders if he should try getting back with him).
He turned down acceptances to medical school. (wonders if it was a mistake);
He is home for the day because the school where he teaches is closed for asbestos testing. He has papers to grade.
Isabel walks into the kitchen:
“Good morning, Isabell says”.
“Here it is. Morning”.
“How are the Columbus essays going?”
“So far, there are six who think of him as a vicious invader, three, who think he invaded America, and that that was a good idea. One from a kid who seems to think the assignment was about what Columbus was wearing”.
“What was he wearing?”
“Some kind of robe. And what sounds like a tiara on his head”.
“Nice”.
“It is. And yet”.
“And yet”.
“Isabell punches Robbie’s shoulder, playfully, as she has been doing since . . . he can’t remember a time she wasn’t doing it. It is, has always been, a comradely gesture, but it is (has always been) delivered with sufficient force to be fleetingly painful, to suggest that camaraderie can contain an implication of rage”.
NOTE…..
Robbie is a very cool Uncle Robbie. The kids loved him. Isabel loved him. Dan loved him. I loved him. You’ll love him.
Dan was once a stoned, rocker, sweating, shirtless— the guy, Dan had expected, years ago, to turn into again, effortlessly, after he gave up his music for a year, maybe two, to be home with his newborn son.
Dan did his best to atone. He went into rehab, for the coke and the drinking and the few pharmaceuticals that he had never mentioned to anyone. He broke up his band, stop writing music altogether. He volunteered to be a househusband for a while so that Isabel could devote herself to her own career.
Dan wanted to resuscitate his music career (that never quite existed) which everyone knows, but Dan.
Five-year-old, Violet was often caught in an impossible position. (the adorable precious child)…..her young predicament had to do with ‘needing-to-be-right’ (she was incredibly observant), ……yet she also needed to have the mysterious world explained to her too.
Violet’s underlying worry was that if she was absent from any room, any event, for too long, the world would forget about her.
Uncle Robbie who was great with both kids wondered:
“How is it possible that a five-year-old girl is already developing a hint of mortal wistfulness, the nascent fear of her own disappearance?”
Nathan — (leave me alone Nathan) — was interested in autonomy…freedom from family expectations and obligations: he just wanted to hang out with his school buddies—distant himself from strife he suspected between his parents.
“Robbie and Dan know they’ve become the central couple. Isabell is, increasingly, a dream they’re having. They both know it. Robbie and Dan are the ones whose union is thriving, the ones who minister to each other, who are raising children together, who juggle the tasks, who want to know each to the other, if they’re all right, relatively speaking”.
So……relatively speaking…..
Robbie wonders if he, Isabell, and Dan are betraying the kids by keeping it a secret that he is moving out of their house soon.
A fundamental question:
Were the adults protecting the children or were they sowing the seeds of what might prove to be a lifetime of mistrust?”
During the lockdown— Robbie was in Iceland (the letters made me cry)…..His ‘aloneness’ …..‘isolation’ …. ‘uncertainty’ ….were reminders of how life, society, and the world had been turned upside down….
…..the increased incidence of psychosocial problems worsening — not even children and adolescents were able to escape the fears.
Michael Cunningham is one of our foremost writers of our generation—-and “Day” is filled with frictions between goodness and kindness, forgiveness and forgetting…yellow dresses….and moving forward.
December 30, 2023
I’m an outlier on my rating of this book and I’m surprised. I thought at first I would love this . It took one paragraph to bring me to that street in Brooklyn just waking up to the day April 5, 2019. Cunningham immediately gives us through multiple points of view, glimpses of the main characters and their relationships with each other. It’s quiet and introspective, a character driven novel with a focus on their ordinary everyday life - usually the kind of story that I love. I liked the writing. It becomes not so ordinary, though because a pandemic is just not that. Yet, even with this intimate look, I felt distanced from them, unable to fully connect emotionally.
I liked the structure with each of the three sections starting on April 5th 2019 , pre pandemic, then April 5, 2020 during the pandemic and April 5, 2021, post pandemic. I found this to be filled with some pretty sad people with too few moments of joy in their lives . I wish I could come up with a better explanation for why this didn’t fully work for me, but it was just my inability to connect with the characters . There are many highly rated reviews and I recommend that you read those.
I received a copy of this book from Random House through NetGalley.
I liked the structure with each of the three sections starting on April 5th 2019 , pre pandemic, then April 5, 2020 during the pandemic and April 5, 2021, post pandemic. I found this to be filled with some pretty sad people with too few moments of joy in their lives . I wish I could come up with a better explanation for why this didn’t fully work for me, but it was just my inability to connect with the characters . There are many highly rated reviews and I recommend that you read those.
I received a copy of this book from Random House through NetGalley.
December 18, 2023
I thought this was a perfect book. I'm not sure how Cunningham manages to get inside the heads and hearts of so many different people: a 10 year old boy, a 5 year old girl, overwhelmed mother, clueless father, doting uncle, plus a couple of peripheral characters who loom large, but he does. I realized after the first chapter I wouldn't be able to underline everything I thought was brilliant, but I wanted to. Told on the same day, April 5th, but in 3 separate years, 2019, 2020, and 2021, encompassing pre, during, and post Covid, we get a sense of their growth and how they will cope with a changing world.
This was a slim book, but not a fast read, as it takes some digesting before going on.
This was a slim book, but not a fast read, as it takes some digesting before going on.
July 26, 2023
4+ Stars
This story covers three days in the life of a New York family, and extended family on:
April 5, 2019
April 5, 2020
April 5, 2021
A story of love.. mostly love, loss and figuring out relationships. before, during, and after the pandemic.
You can read a lot more about it in the synopsis.
This was my first book by this author.. I will be reading more of him.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC!
This story covers three days in the life of a New York family, and extended family on:
April 5, 2019
April 5, 2020
April 5, 2021
A story of love.. mostly love, loss and figuring out relationships. before, during, and after the pandemic.
You can read a lot more about it in the synopsis.
This was my first book by this author.. I will be reading more of him.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC!
December 12, 2023
After so many failures, I can't believe that Cunningham doesn't understand that he shouldn't try to rewrite 'A Home at the End of the World' but 'The Hours'. He needs a Virginia Woolf in his novels to keep him on track. Random, boring people who have the time to constantly have profound thoughts about their comfortable, uneventful life aren't doing it. Banality isn't so deep. 2020 wasn't so banal.
November 17, 2023
One of Harpers Bazaar's 45 Unputdownable Books of 2023!
The Publisher Says: As the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious—and learning to go on—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours
April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.
April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.
April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.
From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: A novel about liminal spaces, a story about transitions, endings, startings-out, and ultimately survival. So, status quo ante for Author Cunningham. As one expects from him, the prose is just beautiful, the characters appealing, the story, while slow paced, one that compels the reader's attention.
The fact of the matter is that novels about the COVID pandemic...a distinct class from pandemic novels, which can be set at any time...are going to need a certain timelessness to be anything other than nonce books. Cunningham's track record suggests that he's well-aware of his task (The Hours was an epidemic novel on several levels and has survived the epidemics it was set during). How better to address this than to focus on the family?
The great, consuming monster that is family, made or found, genetic or simply relational.
The Big Lie of postwar culture was that falling in love with someone meant that one should feel fulfilled, completed, and Happy with them as a partner. The divorce rates of the 1960s and 1970s gave that a thorough debunking. What happens in the made family that, in US culture, goes by the apt name "Nuclear" is often, inevitably more akin to fission than fusion. Dan, the husband, is an almost-was musician turned househusband. Isabel, the mother, is frustrated that she never got the life she expected with the husband she wanted. Robbie, the gay uncle, is their relief valve. They rely on him way too much to jell their emotional experiences of life together. He's living in their attic...which metaphor I'll leave unexplored... while he sorts out his own tangled love-life and career. There's also Dan's brother, his brother's platonic babymama, and their child. Dan and Isabel have two kids, and the kids are unaware of how much this life they've all lived together can change.
For a novel that takes place on three days albeit ones separated by one year from each other, this felt from the get-go to me like an overabundance of points of view. Nothing that happened changed my mind. The brother/babymama drama left me wondering how the lummox didn't see this coming, nor were his family members innocent in not discouraging him from being a sperm donor. He wasn't emotionally prepared for fatherhood so shouldn't have consented. There lies my first bleat of irritation. Isabel, during the pandemic, decides to write Violet, her traumatized daughter, a letter detailing her emotional unraveling and the end of her marriage to Dan to the fifteen-years-older Violet. Since Robbie is at that point in Iceland living his online masquerade life as Wolfe (it actually makes sense in the book) she had to express her disillusionment with her life choices to someone. May I just say that, as someone who was waaay overshared with by his parents (to put it mildly), I say without hesitation that this is a truly terrible idea. There is no point at which a child needs to know what led Mom to not wanting to be mom anymore. If they ask, parents are well advised to deflect.
Robbie, the fulcrum of the levers shoving these people ever-farther apart, is a case-study all by himself in how not to be in relationships. He's crafted...with Isabel, his sister...an Instagram persona that is an extrapolation of himself into omnicompetence, an unattainable goal for flesh-and-blood people, and is seducing others into accepting it as real not just the extra-curated version of himself. There's an element of catfishing in this; it's dishonest at the minimum. The fact that Isabel is both a co-conspirator in and, bizarrely, a victim of, this weird catfishing says a lot about the fundamental performative nature of family life. Aren't we all constructing and curating personas within a family, in fact a relationship of any sort? There's an entire sociological concept devoted to this idea.
If this is to be a lasting artwork explaining the COVID pandemic to us and our heirs, it has to get something otherwise unavailable from the pandemic setting. Here's where I falter in my appreciation for Author Cunningham's dramaturgical eye. I got my expected frisson of lovely-language-gasm. I got my soap-opera needs met with the dynamics of the family decohering and then showing signs of coalescing into other forms. But did any of this illuminate the pandemic's unique social upheaval?
On balance, yes but in a curious way no. This family was always going to undergo fission...people who can't, or don't, or won't communicate clearly and honestly with each other will always fail as a system...and that is just accelerated by the pandemic. That the family is made up of generationally appropriately queer-friendly people is just recognizing realities that are the source of the screeching angst of the change-intolerant religious nuts. The parts of the story that I felt illuminated the pandemic were the grace notes of style, using the forms and format of social media, to make the point that life moved on even while reality stopped. I think some people saw this as a bug, but I believe it's a feature. Insta will, goddesses willing, be long dead by the time pandemic babies are old enough to read this novel, but they'll see how deep and unquenchable life's demand for love and conncection really was back in the quaint pre-wearable-quantum devices days of Mom and Dad's youth. They'll see that the familys they live in were new, slightly scary, ideas yet to develop into what they accept as normal. They can get from this read a sense of the liminality of forced change and its many many echoes.
I think this novel will, like The Hours, stand up to the passage of time. Of course, I'll be dead by the time the verdict is rendered. But I feel good about my chances of being right.
The Publisher Says: As the world changes around them, a family weathers the storms of growing up, growing older, falling in and out of love, losing the things that are most precious—and learning to go on—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours
April 5, 2019 : In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. Meanwhile Nathan, age ten, is taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents.
April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the brownstone is feeling more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe, while Nathan attempts to skirt her rules. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled jabs and frustrated sighs. And beloved Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company.
April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on.
From the brilliant mind of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, Day is a searing, exquisitely crafted meditation on love and loss and the struggles and limitations of family life—how to live together and apart.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: A novel about liminal spaces, a story about transitions, endings, startings-out, and ultimately survival. So, status quo ante for Author Cunningham. As one expects from him, the prose is just beautiful, the characters appealing, the story, while slow paced, one that compels the reader's attention.
The fact of the matter is that novels about the COVID pandemic...a distinct class from pandemic novels, which can be set at any time...are going to need a certain timelessness to be anything other than nonce books. Cunningham's track record suggests that he's well-aware of his task (The Hours was an epidemic novel on several levels and has survived the epidemics it was set during). How better to address this than to focus on the family?
The great, consuming monster that is family, made or found, genetic or simply relational.
The Big Lie of postwar culture was that falling in love with someone meant that one should feel fulfilled, completed, and Happy with them as a partner. The divorce rates of the 1960s and 1970s gave that a thorough debunking. What happens in the made family that, in US culture, goes by the apt name "Nuclear" is often, inevitably more akin to fission than fusion. Dan, the husband, is an almost-was musician turned househusband. Isabel, the mother, is frustrated that she never got the life she expected with the husband she wanted. Robbie, the gay uncle, is their relief valve. They rely on him way too much to jell their emotional experiences of life together. He's living in their attic...which metaphor I'll leave unexplored... while he sorts out his own tangled love-life and career. There's also Dan's brother, his brother's platonic babymama, and their child. Dan and Isabel have two kids, and the kids are unaware of how much this life they've all lived together can change.
For a novel that takes place on three days albeit ones separated by one year from each other, this felt from the get-go to me like an overabundance of points of view. Nothing that happened changed my mind. The brother/babymama drama left me wondering how the lummox didn't see this coming, nor were his family members innocent in not discouraging him from being a sperm donor. He wasn't emotionally prepared for fatherhood so shouldn't have consented. There lies my first bleat of irritation. Isabel, during the pandemic, decides to write Violet, her traumatized daughter, a letter detailing her emotional unraveling and the end of her marriage to Dan to the fifteen-years-older Violet. Since Robbie is at that point in Iceland living his online masquerade life as Wolfe (it actually makes sense in the book) she had to express her disillusionment with her life choices to someone. May I just say that, as someone who was waaay overshared with by his parents (to put it mildly), I say without hesitation that this is a truly terrible idea. There is no point at which a child needs to know what led Mom to not wanting to be mom anymore. If they ask, parents are well advised to deflect.
Robbie, the fulcrum of the levers shoving these people ever-farther apart, is a case-study all by himself in how not to be in relationships. He's crafted...with Isabel, his sister...an Instagram persona that is an extrapolation of himself into omnicompetence, an unattainable goal for flesh-and-blood people, and is seducing others into accepting it as real not just the extra-curated version of himself. There's an element of catfishing in this; it's dishonest at the minimum. The fact that Isabel is both a co-conspirator in and, bizarrely, a victim of, this weird catfishing says a lot about the fundamental performative nature of family life. Aren't we all constructing and curating personas within a family, in fact a relationship of any sort? There's an entire sociological concept devoted to this idea.
If this is to be a lasting artwork explaining the COVID pandemic to us and our heirs, it has to get something otherwise unavailable from the pandemic setting. Here's where I falter in my appreciation for Author Cunningham's dramaturgical eye. I got my expected frisson of lovely-language-gasm. I got my soap-opera needs met with the dynamics of the family decohering and then showing signs of coalescing into other forms. But did any of this illuminate the pandemic's unique social upheaval?
On balance, yes but in a curious way no. This family was always going to undergo fission...people who can't, or don't, or won't communicate clearly and honestly with each other will always fail as a system...and that is just accelerated by the pandemic. That the family is made up of generationally appropriately queer-friendly people is just recognizing realities that are the source of the screeching angst of the change-intolerant religious nuts. The parts of the story that I felt illuminated the pandemic were the grace notes of style, using the forms and format of social media, to make the point that life moved on even while reality stopped. I think some people saw this as a bug, but I believe it's a feature. Insta will, goddesses willing, be long dead by the time pandemic babies are old enough to read this novel, but they'll see how deep and unquenchable life's demand for love and conncection really was back in the quaint pre-wearable-quantum devices days of Mom and Dad's youth. They'll see that the familys they live in were new, slightly scary, ideas yet to develop into what they accept as normal. They can get from this read a sense of the liminality of forced change and its many many echoes.
I think this novel will, like The Hours, stand up to the passage of time. Of course, I'll be dead by the time the verdict is rendered. But I feel good about my chances of being right.
January 24, 2024
I really tried to come up with a few words right after I finished this exquisitely written novel, but all I could do was stare at the screen of my laptop for nearly two hours before giving up.
Clearly, I wasn’t ready to feel completely devastated after that last section, and now, after thinking (and even dreaming about it) for a few days, I can see that, as moving as I thought the whole thing was, what really knocked me out was the level of elegance in which the whole story was told.
Honestly, nothing I can possibly say about such beautiful writing, would do this novel justice. And I’m not saying this just because I’ve been admiring Michael Cunningham’s work for over two decades now.
In fact, I remember feeling a bit disappointed when I found out that after making me wait nearly a decade, his next novel was going to be pandemic related. What if the pandemic didn’t happen? How long more would I have had to wait? And what would his next novel have been about? Was he actually planning on writing a new novel?
Well, it doesn’t really matter now, and at this point, and after what it feels like a complete failure to express my gratitude, I think I’ve managed to say a few things about how hungrily I devoured this book, and how much of an impact it had on me.
I really am the right reader for quiet and understated stories about ordinary people, and it never felt so good to have both my heart and soul crunched, stomped, cut, and ripped apart.
Clearly, I wasn’t ready to feel completely devastated after that last section, and now, after thinking (and even dreaming about it) for a few days, I can see that, as moving as I thought the whole thing was, what really knocked me out was the level of elegance in which the whole story was told.
Honestly, nothing I can possibly say about such beautiful writing, would do this novel justice. And I’m not saying this just because I’ve been admiring Michael Cunningham’s work for over two decades now.
In fact, I remember feeling a bit disappointed when I found out that after making me wait nearly a decade, his next novel was going to be pandemic related. What if the pandemic didn’t happen? How long more would I have had to wait? And what would his next novel have been about? Was he actually planning on writing a new novel?
Well, it doesn’t really matter now, and at this point, and after what it feels like a complete failure to express my gratitude, I think I’ve managed to say a few things about how hungrily I devoured this book, and how much of an impact it had on me.
I really am the right reader for quiet and understated stories about ordinary people, and it never felt so good to have both my heart and soul crunched, stomped, cut, and ripped apart.
December 7, 2023
Oh, Michael, how I've missed you! It's been nine years since the Pulitzer-winner published his last novel, The Snow Queen, which I very much enjoyed, and thirteen years since By Nightfall which was so good it felt like having a religious experience. Of course, he's best known for The Hours (1998), which is an eternal masterpice.
How does Day stack up? Well, maybe not as mind-blowing as prior works, but still a marvelous experience. No one can write a sentence like Cunningham, nor present trauma in such a poetic way. His characters are ordinary, and yet he is able to transform their normal angst into something profound. Divorce, micro-crushes, and everyday parenting make up much of the relatable forms of anxiety, but there's also big topics mixed in--death, afterlife, suicidal curiosity.
The events take place on a single day, April 5, but during three significantly different years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. While there's not much overt discussion of Covid, it obviously is a haunting factor in the 2020 segments. These chapters feel very real to the period, and the heavy weight of stress that came with it. Very artfully handled.
The novel's weakness is no different from other Cunningham novels: there's not much plot. He may be an acquired taste to some, particularly readers who want a lot of action. But keeping it simple is necessary for his prose to shine and for his ability to make art out of the everyday.
That said, there is a lot of tension to keep the pages turning. Even if you're someone who typically needs explosions and espionage, you'll likely be able to devour this book because of its ability to pack that level of drama into unexpected places.
If you've not read Cunningham before, probably The Hours is a better place to start. But long-time fans will not want to skip this one. The master's still got it, and I can't get enough!
How does Day stack up? Well, maybe not as mind-blowing as prior works, but still a marvelous experience. No one can write a sentence like Cunningham, nor present trauma in such a poetic way. His characters are ordinary, and yet he is able to transform their normal angst into something profound. Divorce, micro-crushes, and everyday parenting make up much of the relatable forms of anxiety, but there's also big topics mixed in--death, afterlife, suicidal curiosity.
The events take place on a single day, April 5, but during three significantly different years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. While there's not much overt discussion of Covid, it obviously is a haunting factor in the 2020 segments. These chapters feel very real to the period, and the heavy weight of stress that came with it. Very artfully handled.
The novel's weakness is no different from other Cunningham novels: there's not much plot. He may be an acquired taste to some, particularly readers who want a lot of action. But keeping it simple is necessary for his prose to shine and for his ability to make art out of the everyday.
That said, there is a lot of tension to keep the pages turning. Even if you're someone who typically needs explosions and espionage, you'll likely be able to devour this book because of its ability to pack that level of drama into unexpected places.
If you've not read Cunningham before, probably The Hours is a better place to start. But long-time fans will not want to skip this one. The master's still got it, and I can't get enough!
December 20, 2023
There will be lots of novels about the Covid pandemic. Already I've read at least a half dozen. But Michael Cunningham, with his luminous prose and profound insight into the human soul -- what makes us long to breathe and be seen (or not) -- has written a portrait of life between 2019 and 2021 that is so beautiful it transcends those years. It's a family portrait with characters you are going to worry about and wonder about long after you've finished this remarkable novel.
October 21, 2023
Day" is an exceptionally well-written drama that unfolds against the backdrop of a pandemic. What sets it apart is its ability to refrain from placing the pandemic at the center of the main storyline. Instead, it offers a compelling exploration of the emotional wounds inflicted by the disease on people's lives. The overarching theme here is transformation – how individuals adapt to their new normal, where work conditions have undergone a complete shift, homes have become both sanctuary and prison, and loved ones have, at times, transformed into the most exasperating of companions. It's a narrative that reflects the changing facade of a world that often appears threatening, enigmatic, and predominantly shrouded in darkness.
The main plot unfolds across three timelines: April 5th, 2019, 2020, and 2021, akin to the structure of an essay, with an introduction, body, and conclusion. This narrative artfully explores the lives of a dysfunctional family, delving into themes of motherhood, marital discord, lingering romantic feelings, queerness, and the challenge of adjusting to the new normal amidst chaos. At its core are Dan and Isobel, an unhappily married couple with two children: Violet, an elementary school student, and Nathan, a typically awkward ten-year-old who is navigating his way among a circle of cool friends.
Their household also includes Isobel's younger brother, Robbie, who resides in their attic. And then there's Dan's brother, Garth, accompanied by his son, Odin, and Garth's friend, Chess, who all play significant supporting roles in the family's dynamics.
Robbie stands out as a particularly likable character who aspires to travel the world rather than confine himself to the artificial cyber universe he's constructed on social media. He contemplates a career change, considering a return to the medical field. Robbie's presence is vital in maintaining the equilibrium of family interactions. He's the calm in heated conversations, a listener before he's a talker, allowing people the space to share their secrets. Robbie grapples with complex feelings, questioning whether he's in love with Dan or if it's a form of dependency. Meanwhile, Dan grapples with insecurity, having lost his fame and stardom from his rock star days. He's adrift, uncertain about the person he has become and helpless in stopping his wife from drifting away.
Amidst all this, Isobel contemplates leaving her husband, weighing the potential consequences of her decision and how it might impact the adjustment process for her children. She also confronts her own insecurities related to motherhood.
This work offers a realistic exploration of transition, claustrophobia, fear, insecurities, and complex family dynamics. The unique three-timeline concept and well-executed storytelling provide a refreshing perspective on the enduring resilience of the human spirit, even in the face of daunting obstacles.
"Don't miss this thought-provoking, captivating, and exquisite work of fiction that encourages you to confront your own journey through the pandemic!"
I extend my sincere thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group/Random House for generously providing me with a digital review copy of this outstanding book in exchange for my honest thoughts.
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The main plot unfolds across three timelines: April 5th, 2019, 2020, and 2021, akin to the structure of an essay, with an introduction, body, and conclusion. This narrative artfully explores the lives of a dysfunctional family, delving into themes of motherhood, marital discord, lingering romantic feelings, queerness, and the challenge of adjusting to the new normal amidst chaos. At its core are Dan and Isobel, an unhappily married couple with two children: Violet, an elementary school student, and Nathan, a typically awkward ten-year-old who is navigating his way among a circle of cool friends.
Their household also includes Isobel's younger brother, Robbie, who resides in their attic. And then there's Dan's brother, Garth, accompanied by his son, Odin, and Garth's friend, Chess, who all play significant supporting roles in the family's dynamics.
Robbie stands out as a particularly likable character who aspires to travel the world rather than confine himself to the artificial cyber universe he's constructed on social media. He contemplates a career change, considering a return to the medical field. Robbie's presence is vital in maintaining the equilibrium of family interactions. He's the calm in heated conversations, a listener before he's a talker, allowing people the space to share their secrets. Robbie grapples with complex feelings, questioning whether he's in love with Dan or if it's a form of dependency. Meanwhile, Dan grapples with insecurity, having lost his fame and stardom from his rock star days. He's adrift, uncertain about the person he has become and helpless in stopping his wife from drifting away.
Amidst all this, Isobel contemplates leaving her husband, weighing the potential consequences of her decision and how it might impact the adjustment process for her children. She also confronts her own insecurities related to motherhood.
This work offers a realistic exploration of transition, claustrophobia, fear, insecurities, and complex family dynamics. The unique three-timeline concept and well-executed storytelling provide a refreshing perspective on the enduring resilience of the human spirit, even in the face of daunting obstacles.
"Don't miss this thought-provoking, captivating, and exquisite work of fiction that encourages you to confront your own journey through the pandemic!"
I extend my sincere thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group/Random House for generously providing me with a digital review copy of this outstanding book in exchange for my honest thoughts.
medium blog
June 15, 2023
When the pandemic swept into our lives in 2020, most of us emerged humbled and changed. No other event has been so integral in testing our sense of identity -- who we are, what we are looking for, and what is really important in our lives.
Now, three years later, many writers are striving to relay how this pivotal time that so transformed us. But none so far, in my opinion, are as successful as Michael Cunningham as he elegantly spotlights a family on April 5th during three momentous and sequential years: 2019, 2020, and 2021.
The book begins in 2019 and introduces us to Dan and Isabel, a couple whose foundation is slowly cracking. The glue that helps hold them together is Isabel’s younger gay brother, Robbie, who will soon move out of their attic, and in the meantime, counts the "likes" received for his alluring online avatar. Both Dan and Isabel love Robbie in their own complex way and recognize the dynamics of their own relationship will shift when he leaves. Their two sensitive children, Nathan and Violet, who sense, but are not fully aware, of Robbie's imminent departure, and are slowly emerging into the people they will eventually become.
Peripherally, Dan’s brother Garth is struggling to define the meaning of fatherhood. He agreed to be a sperm donor for his gay female friend, Chess. Now the baby is here, and to his surprise, he has developed strong feelings, not only for the little boy, but for Chess herself.
A year later, the pandemic has been introduced into this petri dish, with all the family in lockdown minus one: Robbie, who is stranded in Iceland, alone with his Instagram creation. As cracks deepen, family members must get real and confront the personal avatars -- the false sense of identity that they've been sending out into the world. By the time 2021 rolls in, each character will be a little older and a little wiser as they face different reality and learn what it means to forge a new path.
Michael Cunningham’s new book is well worth the 10-year rate. It’s beautifully crafted, exquisitely written, and mature with insights as he explores what it means to come home to oneself. I am delighted to have been given the opportunity to be an early reader by Random House in exchange for an honest review.
August 2, 2023
4+ Stars
This is a story of, and about, family. A family whose lives are shared on the same date, April 5th, over several years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. The years of the pandemic, although this isn’t really a story about the pandemic, itself, but a story of the way the pandemic affects this family, each one is affected in their own way, it casts a shadow on all of their lives, and they begin to view each other, and what they want for their futures, in a different light.
This isn’t your average family, it’s a mish-mash, communal kind of family. Isabel, a wife, mother with two kids, who works as a photo editor. Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie, who lives in her attic. Dan, who is married to Isabel, although their relationship slowly dissolves as time passes. The two children, Violet, who was in elementary school until the pandemic hits, and Nathan, a preteen, who is your fairly typical boy going through the years of ‘becoming,’ a typical age for moody behavior. There are also Dan’s brother, Garth, his child, Odin, and Garth’s friend Chess.
And then there is Robbie, who seems to be the one person who adds a sense of balance, the one who seems to know the right things to say to defuse frustration. He is the one who everyone turns to when they need a listening ear. But Robbie dreams of another kind of life, a life of travel to places he’s only dreamed of, and after that, perhaps, medical school. He won’t be lonely in foreign places since his Instagram followers will be keeping him company, and providing connections.
Overall, this is a quiet story of the days, months, years when life changed for virtually everyone on the planet, and the days when the news was filled with the numbers of lives that were lost, and the solemn sound of the ringing of the bells.
Pub Date: 14 Nov 2023
Many thanks for the ARC provided by Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Want to read
October 23, 2023family drama!!!!!
August 30, 2023
DAY (2023)
By Michael Cunningham
Random House, 288 pages.
★★
Michael Cunningham is such a great stylist that he could imbue insurance forms with elegance. But would you want to read them? I devoured past works such as The Hours and The Home at the End of the World, but Day reads like a treatment in search of something. What, exactly? Perhaps a likable character?
The novel’s central device/contrivance, is to unpeel the travails of a handful of Brooklynites by visiting the same day, April 5, in three consecutive years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. You might associate 2020 with the darkest days of Covid, including a nationwide lockdown, but why April 5? Good question. Covid is woven into the novel, but its major theme (intended or not) is the sunset of Generation X. That could be rich fodder for a book, but Cunningham squanders lovely prose via dialogue and interactions reminiscent of a Woody Allen movie in which cloying New Yorkers wallow in their neuroses.
Robbie Walker is the novel’s pivot, even when he’s not present. He’s a gay 6th grade teacher who has been unlucky in love, work, and apartments. He is so bonded with his sister Isabel that since childhood they have fashioned tales of Wolfe and Lyla, imaginary alter egos. Robbie lives in the leaky attic of the small brownstone of Isabel, her husband Dan Byrne, and their two children, 10-year-old Nathan and five-year-old Violet. Though everyone loves Robbie, the kids need separate bedrooms. Robbie is burnt out, can’t find an affordable place to live, and can’t imagine being gay outside of the Metro area. (Really? Has he never heard of Northampton, Ogunquit, Provincetown, Key West, or even Manhattan, Kansas?)
Robbie’s not the only character facing 40 with a bagful of blues. Isabel works for an upscale magazine and fears either she or it will fold; Dan is an ex-rocker who came close to making it, but fell short. Addiction didn’t help. He’s trying to shift into sensitive mode, but his dyed locks, wardrobe, and unfulfilled dreams leave him stuck in gear, which doesn’t help pay the mortgage. Dan’s brother Garth was a sperm donor for English professor Chess’s infant son Odin and had the misfortune of falling in love with both of them, though his attraction to misanthropic Chess is hard to fathom. Garth also makes sculptures that bear the names of Shakespeare plays, most of which are abstract and vaguely disturbing. The art world yawns.
This, mind, is just the 2019 setup, but given the respective levels of self-absorption and discontent, you already have a good idea of where things are headed. In essence, there are five characters who have adult responsibilities without adult mindsets. Such matters are more commonplace these days, but an overabundance of delayed development is neither compelling nor interesting.
Day often toddles, because the characters aren’t written with enough bandwidth to race past their own narcissism. Cunningham is at his sharpest in showing the disintegration of Wolfe and Lyla, who go from Robbie and Isabel’s private support system to a social media phenomenon whose followers can’t discern them as fictive or spot logical inconsistencies. I believe Cunningham wanted us to see how they paralleled “real” life among his principals–Dan’s off/on/off musical career, Garth’s artistic moment, Isabel’s depression, Chess’ emotional numbness– but their respective stases too often stagnates the narrative. Only Robbie steps outside of himself by moving to Iceland. Huh? It sets up something important, but how a guy who thinks living an hour from Greater New York is intolerable decides upon Iceland is baffling.
By the time we get to 2021, everyone is a mess. This includes Nathan, now a surly tween brat, and Violet who is on her way to becoming a prima donna. If we believe Jean Piaget and British director Michael Apted that a child’s basic personality is formed by age 7, the sins of the parents will live on. (I guess we can always root for Odin!) Nonetheless, the shorter third part of the novel is where Cunningham is most affecting. By shifting decisively to tragedy, he hones a sharp edge that induces pathos rather than annoyance. I wonder, though, how many readers will have closed the curtains upon Day before they get there. Cunningham writes too well to call it a failed novel, but I doubt few will call it a notable one.
Rob Weir
By Michael Cunningham
Random House, 288 pages.
★★
Michael Cunningham is such a great stylist that he could imbue insurance forms with elegance. But would you want to read them? I devoured past works such as The Hours and The Home at the End of the World, but Day reads like a treatment in search of something. What, exactly? Perhaps a likable character?
The novel’s central device/contrivance, is to unpeel the travails of a handful of Brooklynites by visiting the same day, April 5, in three consecutive years: 2019, 2020, and 2021. You might associate 2020 with the darkest days of Covid, including a nationwide lockdown, but why April 5? Good question. Covid is woven into the novel, but its major theme (intended or not) is the sunset of Generation X. That could be rich fodder for a book, but Cunningham squanders lovely prose via dialogue and interactions reminiscent of a Woody Allen movie in which cloying New Yorkers wallow in their neuroses.
Robbie Walker is the novel’s pivot, even when he’s not present. He’s a gay 6th grade teacher who has been unlucky in love, work, and apartments. He is so bonded with his sister Isabel that since childhood they have fashioned tales of Wolfe and Lyla, imaginary alter egos. Robbie lives in the leaky attic of the small brownstone of Isabel, her husband Dan Byrne, and their two children, 10-year-old Nathan and five-year-old Violet. Though everyone loves Robbie, the kids need separate bedrooms. Robbie is burnt out, can’t find an affordable place to live, and can’t imagine being gay outside of the Metro area. (Really? Has he never heard of Northampton, Ogunquit, Provincetown, Key West, or even Manhattan, Kansas?)
Robbie’s not the only character facing 40 with a bagful of blues. Isabel works for an upscale magazine and fears either she or it will fold; Dan is an ex-rocker who came close to making it, but fell short. Addiction didn’t help. He’s trying to shift into sensitive mode, but his dyed locks, wardrobe, and unfulfilled dreams leave him stuck in gear, which doesn’t help pay the mortgage. Dan’s brother Garth was a sperm donor for English professor Chess’s infant son Odin and had the misfortune of falling in love with both of them, though his attraction to misanthropic Chess is hard to fathom. Garth also makes sculptures that bear the names of Shakespeare plays, most of which are abstract and vaguely disturbing. The art world yawns.
This, mind, is just the 2019 setup, but given the respective levels of self-absorption and discontent, you already have a good idea of where things are headed. In essence, there are five characters who have adult responsibilities without adult mindsets. Such matters are more commonplace these days, but an overabundance of delayed development is neither compelling nor interesting.
Day often toddles, because the characters aren’t written with enough bandwidth to race past their own narcissism. Cunningham is at his sharpest in showing the disintegration of Wolfe and Lyla, who go from Robbie and Isabel’s private support system to a social media phenomenon whose followers can’t discern them as fictive or spot logical inconsistencies. I believe Cunningham wanted us to see how they paralleled “real” life among his principals–Dan’s off/on/off musical career, Garth’s artistic moment, Isabel’s depression, Chess’ emotional numbness– but their respective stases too often stagnates the narrative. Only Robbie steps outside of himself by moving to Iceland. Huh? It sets up something important, but how a guy who thinks living an hour from Greater New York is intolerable decides upon Iceland is baffling.
By the time we get to 2021, everyone is a mess. This includes Nathan, now a surly tween brat, and Violet who is on her way to becoming a prima donna. If we believe Jean Piaget and British director Michael Apted that a child’s basic personality is formed by age 7, the sins of the parents will live on. (I guess we can always root for Odin!) Nonetheless, the shorter third part of the novel is where Cunningham is most affecting. By shifting decisively to tragedy, he hones a sharp edge that induces pathos rather than annoyance. I wonder, though, how many readers will have closed the curtains upon Day before they get there. Cunningham writes too well to call it a failed novel, but I doubt few will call it a notable one.
Rob Weir
November 30, 2023
A woman weeping on the subway is always a stranger. To others and, more likely than not, to herself.
We meet a family on April 5 of 2019, and spend some time getting to know them. Then it is April 5, 2020, and COVID 19 is running rampant through the population. Then we revisit everyone a year later. COVID is no longer a concern, but its existence has changed this family forever.
Part of me wants to give this book only three stars. I really didn't find any of the characters very engaging. I was most interested in their activities during the COVID year, and I wish the author had spent more time writing about that day.
I spent my "confinement" in the company of my husband and youngest son who was home from college. We honestly enjoyed having the time together, though, to be fair, our house is big enough that we could easily have "alone time" whenever we needed it. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to spend those months trapped in a NYC apartment with a man I could barely tolerate, OR, alone in a cabin in Iceland, for that matter . . . until Cunningham imagined it for me.
In the end, it was the book's satisfying conclusion, and Cunningham's lovely writing that raised my rating to four stars. After all, you don't read paragraphs like this every day:
There's a song inside the song. It isn't beautiful, it isn't only beautiful, though it contains beauty like a plum contains its stone. It's the song that leaves nothing out. It's a lament and an aria. It's that old ditty about Frosted Flakes and it's an anthem to the perfume your mother wore when you were a child. It's a hymn sung by a girl with candles in paper cups, it's the cry of the rabbit when your father slits its throat, it's the sound of your wife whispering in a dream that's not about you.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the read.
We meet a family on April 5 of 2019, and spend some time getting to know them. Then it is April 5, 2020, and COVID 19 is running rampant through the population. Then we revisit everyone a year later. COVID is no longer a concern, but its existence has changed this family forever.
Part of me wants to give this book only three stars. I really didn't find any of the characters very engaging. I was most interested in their activities during the COVID year, and I wish the author had spent more time writing about that day.
I spent my "confinement" in the company of my husband and youngest son who was home from college. We honestly enjoyed having the time together, though, to be fair, our house is big enough that we could easily have "alone time" whenever we needed it. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like to spend those months trapped in a NYC apartment with a man I could barely tolerate, OR, alone in a cabin in Iceland, for that matter . . . until Cunningham imagined it for me.
In the end, it was the book's satisfying conclusion, and Cunningham's lovely writing that raised my rating to four stars. After all, you don't read paragraphs like this every day:
There's a song inside the song. It isn't beautiful, it isn't only beautiful, though it contains beauty like a plum contains its stone. It's the song that leaves nothing out. It's a lament and an aria. It's that old ditty about Frosted Flakes and it's an anthem to the perfume your mother wore when you were a child. It's a hymn sung by a girl with candles in paper cups, it's the cry of the rabbit when your father slits its throat, it's the sound of your wife whispering in a dream that's not about you.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the read.
February 14, 2024
I love Michael Cunningham but this new novel of his seemed bereft of inspiration to me, even a little lazy as if he didn't have the energy to challenge himself in any significant way. A dysfunctional family, an artist living in New York, a foray into social media role playing are all themes that have been done to death. Certainly the world doesn't need another New York artist. Why not a zookeeper or someone who monitors CCTV footage for a living? I doubt if there was anything in this entire novel he had to research. It's all very well writing about what you know but if what you know is already comprehensively known? There were some lovely passages of prose but as a novel it had little traction, little dramatic energy.
February 19, 2024
Day is the latest book by Michael Cunningham and aptly titled as the story covers one day over a three-year period of time: April 5, 2019 - Morning; April 5, 2020 - Afternoon; and April 5, 2021 - Evening. At the heart of the story is the relationship between two siblings Isabel and her younger brother Robbie who are both on the cusp of change. Isabel is a magazine editor, a wife and mother of two children. Her big-hearted brother lives in the attic of Isabel and Dan's brownstone. Dan, an aging rocker, is struggling with writing songs for a comeback. Robbie has deferred medical school for ten years and is now teaching in a New York school. They have asked Robbie to find another place to live as precocious 5-year old Violet and ten-year old Nathan are currently sharing a room and the family needs the room for their growing preteen son. There is also Dan's struggling artist brother, Garth. He is coping with his deepening feelings for his friend, Chess, and the baby they both share, Odin. But at the center of this story, it's heart, is Robbie. Everyone loves Robbie, each in their own way, and he, them. However, the through-line in this all-encompassing tale is the development of Robbie's alter-ego, Wolfe. His many followers on Instagram love that he is in his final year of his residency in pediatrics, and working in a community clinic. His story looms larger throughout the book. As we have come to associate with Michael Cunningham's writing, he gives us a unique perspective on family relationships and the many different kinds of love that can make up family with empathy, grace and humor. While this is not a story about the pandemic, the author examines not only the crises and traumas, but how people coped, often with personal growth during this particularly challenging time in our history. Interestingly, Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer prize winning, The Hours was set after the flu epidemic of 1919-1920. Literary references abound throughout this book, most prominently the specter of Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare's tragedies, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and Colm Toibin. A big theme here is women questioning marriage and their sense of freedom as in these snippets of conversation and the bigger picture:
I will just close with a beautiful quote and sentiment from Ron Charles of the Washington Post:
"What we're seeing here, in 'House of Mirth,' is anti-Semitism and misogyny, but it's also more or less the end of the marriage story."
"Wharton doesn't know it, but Joyce is on the other side of the Atlantic, already working on 'Ulysses.' Which will blow her right out of the water."
"Here come the writers who won't only rethink narrative without the marriage plot at its center, they'll convey women's freedom within a marriage. Consider 'Mrs. Dalloway.'"
I will just close with a beautiful quote and sentiment from Ron Charles of the Washington Post:
"The only problem with Michael Cunningham's prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals' work. He is the most elegant writer in America."
August 2, 2023
Opening these first pages of DAY reminded me how deft Cunningham is in minor key, so elegiac. I felt myself floating in a chilly lake, with lush trees on one side, perhaps mountains to the north. Now it is April 5, 2019. The changing patterns of sunlight fill the eponymous Day. Robbie-- brother, uncle, and friend, he’s about to move out from living with his sister and bro-in-law BFF. It’s a big change. He spends some free time with his fake Instagram account, a sort of avatar-ish projection of self but similar to his attainable self. Isabel, his sister, enjoys Wolfe’s Instagram and where the “parts” come from. Robbie’s a teacher who contemplates changing professions again, to go back to before, when he chose one fork over another. Can he? go back? Is a book epoch the same as a human epic?
The April5, 2020 section emerged as the most immediate in tone and texture. I hesitate to call this a pandemic novel, as that suggests a medical setting or two. Day doesn’t feel medical, and the words Covid and coronavirus are never used. Virus hits the planet; Cunningham concerned himself with the contrasts of transitions. There’s before, then the transition from, and finally, surfacing. I’m no longer floating on the lake, I’ve walked out, shivering, and dried off, and made some determined choices. Overlaying all this was a human drama separate from Covid, and some of the conflicts and crises that these characters faced were going to be faced, regardless. The pandemic only simplified the linear part of their momentum.
Maybe, in the novel, it all happened at night, in the bitterest hours; now it is DAY, and the sun leaves nothing to the imagination, you are transparently engrossed in your life. Admittedly, events didn’t always seem to be happening (in front of me), but had always happened. I thought of Henry James periodically, even if MC and James don’t use the same tense to memorialize these moments. There’s a sense of the past in the future and the future in the past. It’s pretty sad when the present eludes us. Then Robbie does past inventory, goes through his things and remembers ex- lovers by residual material possessions. One boyfriend gave him an insultingly expensive scarf hurriedly chosen from the airport on the last leg of their togetherness as a couple. It was a vibrant but soldierly blue.
Isabel, Robbie’s sister, is contemplating leaving her husband, Dan, in 2019. She is bored and lonely with her once-almost-rock-star husband. Would their two young children adapt? I’m not sure they contemplate that directly. The adult characters were densely retrospective in this novel, in 2019. Then, it’s April 5, 2020 and they are forced to change everything from greetings to hygiene. Socially distance, work from home, take cover! I spun with it like I was in the spokes of their wheels, and in a continuous loop of thoughts. (Remember quarantine?)
What did other people do, how did they cope? Is that a quaint sentiment, to capsulize a pandemic few years? The essential lives of these protagonists emerged more strongly than their pandemic lives.
However dull my own descriptions of this book, my experience was anything but. Cunningham made me care about these characters, and then we take a bracing trip to Iceland! Iceland! Some scenes may start off rather static and sparse, but he fills it in so that it starts swaying, a 3-D shake dance as you live with their concerns.
I’ll just talk a smidge about the kids. Nathan is an awkward ten-year-old who hasn’t figured out that he’s that awkward yet, so he’s still in with the “cool” guys. They sneak around playing D&D during the pandemic, which prepubescents would do. They don’t feel mortal yet. However, Violet at 3 is afraid to open the windows and let the monster virus in. She personifies it in her head, and it pervades her life. She’s also a typical little girl who loves the frilly costume dresses that her uncle gifts her. Violet will wear them out until they crumble, she’s fiercely independent in spirit, follows no peer.
From 2019 to 2021, the various paths of this ensemble cast bring about expected and unexpected turns, all which comprise a contemporary novel of domesticity, with a classic kick to it. April 5th of each year emphasized the desire to connect and sustain; spring again, spring three times. The most we can do is observe their lives. It’s a little like life being a Zoom meeting we are pausing before pressing play again. The family is sharing a new certainty. They still have their times together and also apart. It’s possible they are learning acceptance, with a little resolve.
Thank you to Penguin Random House for sending me an ARC to review, and a real special thanks to Michael Cunningham for writing the book and sending it out to passionate readers.
The April5, 2020 section emerged as the most immediate in tone and texture. I hesitate to call this a pandemic novel, as that suggests a medical setting or two. Day doesn’t feel medical, and the words Covid and coronavirus are never used. Virus hits the planet; Cunningham concerned himself with the contrasts of transitions. There’s before, then the transition from, and finally, surfacing. I’m no longer floating on the lake, I’ve walked out, shivering, and dried off, and made some determined choices. Overlaying all this was a human drama separate from Covid, and some of the conflicts and crises that these characters faced were going to be faced, regardless. The pandemic only simplified the linear part of their momentum.
Maybe, in the novel, it all happened at night, in the bitterest hours; now it is DAY, and the sun leaves nothing to the imagination, you are transparently engrossed in your life. Admittedly, events didn’t always seem to be happening (in front of me), but had always happened. I thought of Henry James periodically, even if MC and James don’t use the same tense to memorialize these moments. There’s a sense of the past in the future and the future in the past. It’s pretty sad when the present eludes us. Then Robbie does past inventory, goes through his things and remembers ex- lovers by residual material possessions. One boyfriend gave him an insultingly expensive scarf hurriedly chosen from the airport on the last leg of their togetherness as a couple. It was a vibrant but soldierly blue.
Isabel, Robbie’s sister, is contemplating leaving her husband, Dan, in 2019. She is bored and lonely with her once-almost-rock-star husband. Would their two young children adapt? I’m not sure they contemplate that directly. The adult characters were densely retrospective in this novel, in 2019. Then, it’s April 5, 2020 and they are forced to change everything from greetings to hygiene. Socially distance, work from home, take cover! I spun with it like I was in the spokes of their wheels, and in a continuous loop of thoughts. (Remember quarantine?)
What did other people do, how did they cope? Is that a quaint sentiment, to capsulize a pandemic few years? The essential lives of these protagonists emerged more strongly than their pandemic lives.
However dull my own descriptions of this book, my experience was anything but. Cunningham made me care about these characters, and then we take a bracing trip to Iceland! Iceland! Some scenes may start off rather static and sparse, but he fills it in so that it starts swaying, a 3-D shake dance as you live with their concerns.
I’ll just talk a smidge about the kids. Nathan is an awkward ten-year-old who hasn’t figured out that he’s that awkward yet, so he’s still in with the “cool” guys. They sneak around playing D&D during the pandemic, which prepubescents would do. They don’t feel mortal yet. However, Violet at 3 is afraid to open the windows and let the monster virus in. She personifies it in her head, and it pervades her life. She’s also a typical little girl who loves the frilly costume dresses that her uncle gifts her. Violet will wear them out until they crumble, she’s fiercely independent in spirit, follows no peer.
From 2019 to 2021, the various paths of this ensemble cast bring about expected and unexpected turns, all which comprise a contemporary novel of domesticity, with a classic kick to it. April 5th of each year emphasized the desire to connect and sustain; spring again, spring three times. The most we can do is observe their lives. It’s a little like life being a Zoom meeting we are pausing before pressing play again. The family is sharing a new certainty. They still have their times together and also apart. It’s possible they are learning acceptance, with a little resolve.
Thank you to Penguin Random House for sending me an ARC to review, and a real special thanks to Michael Cunningham for writing the book and sending it out to passionate readers.
March 11, 2024
There's a concept in photography called bokeh. The name comes from the Japanese word for 'blur' or 'haze.' A photo that utilizes bokeh has a clear, crisp image of something -- a person, flower, butterfly on a flower (OK, OK: a kitten) typically near the center of the picture, but the background is blurred. You might be able to generally make out what's there but it's like you're looking at them through thick, viscous eye drops.
"Day" made me think of what literary bokeh might look like. There are a handful of characters whom we see clearly (more clearly, in fact, than they see each other), but the background is barely hinted at. In most other circumstances this absence wouldn't likely even be noticed. The setting for much of "Day," however, is not a "typical" circumstance: It's New York City during the Covid years, the Trump years. Each chapter takes place on a single day, April 5, albeit in different years (2019, 2020, 2021) at different times of day (morning, afternoon, evening). We are told several times of ambulance sirens in the streets, and there is one paragraph in a letter that refers as if in passing to hospitals and mortuaries filled beyond capacity, but the words 'Covid' and pandemic never appear. Nor does the name 'Trump' or January 6 or any of the other noteworthy things from those years that might be named. Instead of national trauma we watch a family slowly falling apart at its many seams.
A stay-at-home husband named Dan (failed ex-rocker, ex-addict with bleached hair) and his wife Isabel (a hard-driven photo editor at a major magazine which isn't likely to stay in business very much longer), live in Brooklyn. As the "day" progresses we watch them quietly, separately wonder whether there's any love left in the marriage, though they never say it out loud. Their two kids -- a sensitive boy named Nathan, 10 years old at the start of the book, and his difficult-to-describe, self-absorbed 5 year old sister Violet, who may or may not be able to see dead people (but not in a 'Sixth Sense' way). And Isabel's gay, younger brother "cool Uncle Robbie," a conflicted elementary school teacher who lives in their attic. Dan and Isabel both love Robbie but they have told him he must live elsewhere because they need the room for the kids.
All the adults have some measure of self-awareness, but it's never quite enough. Time and again we read how these people don't seem to know who they are, what they're supposed to be, what happened to the person they thought they'd become. Isabel, we are told, "has never been quite sure about what she looks like. She’s sometimes only semi-identifiable to herself, in photographs. She has, since childhood, been trying to catch glimpses of her authentic, immutable self.” She loves the anonymity of the subway ("a world of the in-between") and envisions herself as a haunting presence that will remain in the house log after the family leaves, "the Woman on the stairs" who will forever sit there staring at the blank screen of her dead phone. Dan sees himself as "egocentric and emotionally venal" and secretly wishes Isabel with "take him on as if he were a third child." He pines for the days of his modest success as a musician. Robbie isn't sure he wants to teach anymore, doesn't know where he is to go, whether he will ever find love. He creates an avatar named Wolfe for himself on Instagram, a good-looking hero to whom people are drawn, a doctor.
From time to time Dan's irresponsible artist brother Garth, and Chess, a tattooed lesbian academic to whom Garth donated his sperm and who bore their child Odin (!), appear on stage with their own struggles and frustrations. They too are going through a crisis of existential uncertainty.
Cunningham depicts these people and their struggles with extraordinary acuity. We listen in on their thoughts about themselves and each other, but in the end Cunningham lets us decide for ourselves what we are to think of them. Aside from Robbie, they're difficult to like or feel much sympathy for: they're thirty-somethings living in Brooklyn, wrestling with the problems of adulthood, terribly self-centered, loving their kids and resenting them at the same time. The drama of the streets that we don't see is the blurred setting (bokeh) that lends "Day" its real weight, the knowledge the reader has (that the characters don't, of course) that these people who feel cut off and isolated from one another and even themselves are living in a country where people are cut off from one another -- politically, economically, psychologically, literally.
"Day" is the kind of book that pulls the reader in slowly. The reader has to decide whether he/she wants to spend time with these sad, rather unlikable people. My feeling is Yes, it's worth it because Cunningham has something to show us. He's a brilliant crafter of words, a sensitive observer of flawed people, a master of the evocative image (the owl that suddenly appearis outside a window in the city, the flashing red light of the Shoe Hospital), the poignant thought: “Or, more to the point, do we arrive at it’s too late over and over again, only to return to working through this before it’s too late arrives, yet again?” (The light and sentences like this seemed to me echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald.)
And, of course, there are descriptions that soar, like the scene where Violet looks through a window out into the night woods: “The woods are alive with the spirits of animals and the dreams of trees, most active at night, when the dreams and the spirits are most fully awake, when they drift across the forest floor, murmuring in wordless languages they themselves don’t fully understand, searching, confused, as the planets shine down from among the leaves and the houses glow so faintly as to be invisible to anyone who does not live in them.”
Gorgeous words. And I can't help feeling they might easily be used to describe poor, lost humanity.
"Day" made me think of what literary bokeh might look like. There are a handful of characters whom we see clearly (more clearly, in fact, than they see each other), but the background is barely hinted at. In most other circumstances this absence wouldn't likely even be noticed. The setting for much of "Day," however, is not a "typical" circumstance: It's New York City during the Covid years, the Trump years. Each chapter takes place on a single day, April 5, albeit in different years (2019, 2020, 2021) at different times of day (morning, afternoon, evening). We are told several times of ambulance sirens in the streets, and there is one paragraph in a letter that refers as if in passing to hospitals and mortuaries filled beyond capacity, but the words 'Covid' and pandemic never appear. Nor does the name 'Trump' or January 6 or any of the other noteworthy things from those years that might be named. Instead of national trauma we watch a family slowly falling apart at its many seams.
A stay-at-home husband named Dan (failed ex-rocker, ex-addict with bleached hair) and his wife Isabel (a hard-driven photo editor at a major magazine which isn't likely to stay in business very much longer), live in Brooklyn. As the "day" progresses we watch them quietly, separately wonder whether there's any love left in the marriage, though they never say it out loud. Their two kids -- a sensitive boy named Nathan, 10 years old at the start of the book, and his difficult-to-describe, self-absorbed 5 year old sister Violet, who may or may not be able to see dead people (but not in a 'Sixth Sense' way). And Isabel's gay, younger brother "cool Uncle Robbie," a conflicted elementary school teacher who lives in their attic. Dan and Isabel both love Robbie but they have told him he must live elsewhere because they need the room for the kids.
All the adults have some measure of self-awareness, but it's never quite enough. Time and again we read how these people don't seem to know who they are, what they're supposed to be, what happened to the person they thought they'd become. Isabel, we are told, "has never been quite sure about what she looks like. She’s sometimes only semi-identifiable to herself, in photographs. She has, since childhood, been trying to catch glimpses of her authentic, immutable self.” She loves the anonymity of the subway ("a world of the in-between") and envisions herself as a haunting presence that will remain in the house log after the family leaves, "the Woman on the stairs" who will forever sit there staring at the blank screen of her dead phone. Dan sees himself as "egocentric and emotionally venal" and secretly wishes Isabel with "take him on as if he were a third child." He pines for the days of his modest success as a musician. Robbie isn't sure he wants to teach anymore, doesn't know where he is to go, whether he will ever find love. He creates an avatar named Wolfe for himself on Instagram, a good-looking hero to whom people are drawn, a doctor.
From time to time Dan's irresponsible artist brother Garth, and Chess, a tattooed lesbian academic to whom Garth donated his sperm and who bore their child Odin (!), appear on stage with their own struggles and frustrations. They too are going through a crisis of existential uncertainty.
Cunningham depicts these people and their struggles with extraordinary acuity. We listen in on their thoughts about themselves and each other, but in the end Cunningham lets us decide for ourselves what we are to think of them. Aside from Robbie, they're difficult to like or feel much sympathy for: they're thirty-somethings living in Brooklyn, wrestling with the problems of adulthood, terribly self-centered, loving their kids and resenting them at the same time. The drama of the streets that we don't see is the blurred setting (bokeh) that lends "Day" its real weight, the knowledge the reader has (that the characters don't, of course) that these people who feel cut off and isolated from one another and even themselves are living in a country where people are cut off from one another -- politically, economically, psychologically, literally.
"Day" is the kind of book that pulls the reader in slowly. The reader has to decide whether he/she wants to spend time with these sad, rather unlikable people. My feeling is Yes, it's worth it because Cunningham has something to show us. He's a brilliant crafter of words, a sensitive observer of flawed people, a master of the evocative image (the owl that suddenly appearis outside a window in the city, the flashing red light of the Shoe Hospital), the poignant thought: “Or, more to the point, do we arrive at it’s too late over and over again, only to return to working through this before it’s too late arrives, yet again?” (The light and sentences like this seemed to me echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald.)
And, of course, there are descriptions that soar, like the scene where Violet looks through a window out into the night woods: “The woods are alive with the spirits of animals and the dreams of trees, most active at night, when the dreams and the spirits are most fully awake, when they drift across the forest floor, murmuring in wordless languages they themselves don’t fully understand, searching, confused, as the planets shine down from among the leaves and the houses glow so faintly as to be invisible to anyone who does not live in them.”
Gorgeous words. And I can't help feeling they might easily be used to describe poor, lost humanity.
April 8, 2024
Almost wonderful. This book had the potential to become my ugly-crying big (little) book of 2024, but it didn't quite get there. Don't get me wrong, there were a few tears, but of a more discreet nature - the type you'd just about get away with on public transport.
The title of the book is important, but I guess 'One Day' was already taken. Cunningham's slant on this idea is looking at an extended family on 5 April over 3 consecutive years, and when you see that the first year is 2019, you kind of know more or less what is around the corner.
At the heart of the story is a most unusual love triangle. Dan, his wife Isabel, and her brother Robbie. Each loves the other two ardently, if not sexually. Dan and Isabel own two small apartments in a Brooklyn brownstone. Their two kids came along before they had the chance to convert the apartments into one large family home, so for a while the young family has been living in the lower apartment, while Robbie lives upstairs. But in 2019 they need to find space for their son Nathan to have his own room, so Robbie is looking for somewhere else he can afford on his modest salary. Rounding out the cast of characters are Garth, Dan's brother, his newborn son Odin, and Odin's mother Chess. And Wolfe. Mustn't overlook Wolfe.
The following year, of course everything has changed. Robbie is stranded in Iceland (with Wolfe!). Back home in Brooklyn, the cracks in Dan & Isabel's marriage have widened, and their daughter Violet is in a high state of anxiety about death creeping in through open windows. The sirens are constant, and sometimes they sound very close. Compared to Violet, Nathan's far more cavalier, as you would expect with an eleven year old's attitude towards mortality.
2021 is all aftermath and consequences.
I loved almost everything about this book, but I think the reason it didn't quite reach the highest of heights was that there was an element of something odd in relation to Violet, the young girl. It wasn't exactly supernatural or paranormal, but there was a very distinct feyness about her and her behaviours. I don't mind that in and of itself, but it didn't sit quite right for me in this book.
This was my first time reading Michael Cunningham (in preparation for the Melbourne Writers' Festival 2024) and I am a new fan. His writing is exquisite. I'm looking forward to diving into his back catalogue.
The title of the book is important, but I guess 'One Day' was already taken. Cunningham's slant on this idea is looking at an extended family on 5 April over 3 consecutive years, and when you see that the first year is 2019, you kind of know more or less what is around the corner.
At the heart of the story is a most unusual love triangle. Dan, his wife Isabel, and her brother Robbie. Each loves the other two ardently, if not sexually. Dan and Isabel own two small apartments in a Brooklyn brownstone. Their two kids came along before they had the chance to convert the apartments into one large family home, so for a while the young family has been living in the lower apartment, while Robbie lives upstairs. But in 2019 they need to find space for their son Nathan to have his own room, so Robbie is looking for somewhere else he can afford on his modest salary. Rounding out the cast of characters are Garth, Dan's brother, his newborn son Odin, and Odin's mother Chess. And Wolfe. Mustn't overlook Wolfe.
The following year, of course everything has changed. Robbie is stranded in Iceland (with Wolfe!). Back home in Brooklyn, the cracks in Dan & Isabel's marriage have widened, and their daughter Violet is in a high state of anxiety about death creeping in through open windows. The sirens are constant, and sometimes they sound very close. Compared to Violet, Nathan's far more cavalier, as you would expect with an eleven year old's attitude towards mortality.
2021 is all aftermath and consequences.
I loved almost everything about this book, but I think the reason it didn't quite reach the highest of heights was that there was an element of something odd in relation to Violet, the young girl. It wasn't exactly supernatural or paranormal, but there was a very distinct feyness about her and her behaviours. I don't mind that in and of itself, but it didn't sit quite right for me in this book.
This was my first time reading Michael Cunningham (in preparation for the Melbourne Writers' Festival 2024) and I am a new fan. His writing is exquisite. I'm looking forward to diving into his back catalogue.
October 24, 2023
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Genre: Literary Fiction
The challenges and constraints of family life, love, and loss are explored throughout this story. The events of the novel take place over a period of three years in Brooklyn, and the characters in the story are a family. The story opens in April 2019, with the couple Isabel Walker and Dan Byrne falling out of love. Isabel keeps referring to Dan as her "househusband."
Robbie, Isabel's younger brother, has to move out of the house, and his departure poses a threat to the unity of the family structure. In April 2020, as a result of COVID-19, the entire world is placed under quarantine, and the family is compelled to face new problems and come to terms with what they've learned and what they've lost.
The book's final section takes place in April 2021, when the family has finally recovered from the catastrophe and is adjusting to the new world.
This is the second book by the author that I've had the pleasure of reading. My first recommendation is "The Hours," which is widely considered to be one of the best novels ever written. When I first started reading this story, I did so with very high hopes for what it would have to offer. I'm sorry to say that I can't say that all of those aspirations were satisfied.
Although the author used engaging periods and the events in this story are intriguing, I felt like something was lacking for me. Yes, the characters in this story are also fascinating to some degree. It seems to me that the author's decision to structure many of the portions of the book as emails has somehow diminished the impact of the narrative.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the ARC of this book.
Genre: Literary Fiction
The challenges and constraints of family life, love, and loss are explored throughout this story. The events of the novel take place over a period of three years in Brooklyn, and the characters in the story are a family. The story opens in April 2019, with the couple Isabel Walker and Dan Byrne falling out of love. Isabel keeps referring to Dan as her "househusband."
Robbie, Isabel's younger brother, has to move out of the house, and his departure poses a threat to the unity of the family structure. In April 2020, as a result of COVID-19, the entire world is placed under quarantine, and the family is compelled to face new problems and come to terms with what they've learned and what they've lost.
The book's final section takes place in April 2021, when the family has finally recovered from the catastrophe and is adjusting to the new world.
This is the second book by the author that I've had the pleasure of reading. My first recommendation is "The Hours," which is widely considered to be one of the best novels ever written. When I first started reading this story, I did so with very high hopes for what it would have to offer. I'm sorry to say that I can't say that all of those aspirations were satisfied.
Although the author used engaging periods and the events in this story are intriguing, I felt like something was lacking for me. Yes, the characters in this story are also fascinating to some degree. It seems to me that the author's decision to structure many of the portions of the book as emails has somehow diminished the impact of the narrative.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the ARC of this book.
December 4, 2023
Day, Michael Cunningham's latest novel follows one family on November 14 across three years (2019, 2020, and 2021). It takes place during COVID and the fears and realities of the pandemic drive the story. It captures our failings but also our resilience, the ways in which we struggle to hold ourselves and our relationships together. Don't avoid this remarkable book because you've had enough of the pandemic. Read it and savor the language. Cunningham is among the best anywhere at capturing dialog, the things both said and unsaid, the internal monologs. The story and characters ring true and the pacing is impeccable. Read it. You'll be glad you did.
I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.
April 3, 2024
Mijn eerste Cunningham en ik vond dit echt prachtig!
November 7, 2023
Aptly named, Day, for the story covers one full day in the life of an extended family:
April 5, 2019 (morning)
April 5, 2020 (afternoon)
April 5, 2021 (evening)
Set in Brooklyn, the cast of characters are Dan, his wife Isabel, her brother Robbie, and their two children, Nathan (10) and Violet (5). Dan and Isabel have asked Robbie to find another place to live so that their children can have their own bedrooms. Also in their lives are Dan's brother Garth, his friend Chess, and their baby son Odin.
The character-driven story of course deals with the relationships within this close-knit group. The selection of these three years in particular means that Covid plays a big role in their lives--the isolation, the dangers.
The story is beautifully written, the characters well-drawn, the dynamics of human relationships so well developed in just these three short glimpses into their lives. I've been missing something by not having read Michael Cunningham's novels up to now. I intend to correct that.
I received an arc of this new novel from the author and publisher via NetGalley. Many thanks! My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.
April 5, 2019 (morning)
April 5, 2020 (afternoon)
April 5, 2021 (evening)
Set in Brooklyn, the cast of characters are Dan, his wife Isabel, her brother Robbie, and their two children, Nathan (10) and Violet (5). Dan and Isabel have asked Robbie to find another place to live so that their children can have their own bedrooms. Also in their lives are Dan's brother Garth, his friend Chess, and their baby son Odin.
The character-driven story of course deals with the relationships within this close-knit group. The selection of these three years in particular means that Covid plays a big role in their lives--the isolation, the dangers.
The story is beautifully written, the characters well-drawn, the dynamics of human relationships so well developed in just these three short glimpses into their lives. I've been missing something by not having read Michael Cunningham's novels up to now. I intend to correct that.
I received an arc of this new novel from the author and publisher via NetGalley. Many thanks! My review is voluntary and the opinions expressed are my own.
December 21, 2023
I hope to reread this someday, to give it another chance. In an effort to speed things up, I did a combination of reading the ARC and listening to the Audible release. The audiobook was narrated by the wonderful Julianne Moore… but I was not drawn in by her reading at all. She is an extremely talented actress whom I have enjoyed in a number of film performances, but I found it hard to stay connected to her storytelling. When switching back to the book I could only hear her voice and her pacing.
As I said, I want to give this another chance someday, as very little actually happens and it may be easier to concentrate on these characters with only the voice in my head.
As I said, I want to give this another chance someday, as very little actually happens and it may be easier to concentrate on these characters with only the voice in my head.
November 9, 2023
Sometimes as I'm reading a book I think, "I'm either not smart enough or deep enough to understand what I'm reading." But I plow through because #goals. And then I finish the last page and I'm like... "yep, not smart or deep enough." And that folks... was Day in a nutshell for me.
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