Day (5+*)

 

What makes a novel a masterpiece?  For me, it's story, character, writing, resonance and epiphany, the rarest of birds.  Michael Cunningham, who was inspired by Virginia Woolf to write The Hours, once again adds literary allusion to his latest work, and manages to tie it all together with a . . . wait for it: healing use of social media.  

In other words, Day is the real thing.

First the inspired structure and very slight but absolutely compelling story: 

Cunningham takes snapshots of April 5th in three successive years, including 2020 smack dab in the middle.  Although he never mentions covid, you know pretty much know where he's going with a quick glance at the table of contents alone.  

Tightly wound Isabel is married to Dan, a wanna-be rock star in recovery who continues to bleach his hair.  She's the breadwinner, and he's the house husband who writes songs when he's not taking care of their two children, who are as closely observed as the adults. Robbie, Isabel's underachieving gay brother, lives upstairs with the Brooklyn family, although he's about to vacate so ten-year-old Nathan and Violet, half his age, finally can have separate bedrooms. Dan's brother Gareth, a sculptor, has donated the sperm to father baby Odin with his friend Chess, an academic feminist with regrets.

Character (oddly enough, heterosexual character) is Cunningham's wheelhouse.

Isabel herself is insufficiently dramatic—taciturn, more than a little coldhearted, someone who shops at the farm market in hope of becoming more convincingly the kind of person who shops at the farm market, the kind of person who’s at home among all the women and men who’ve brought their own bags (she herself never remembers), who are jovial and self-satisfied, unconcerned about themselves as members of the newly rural rich, hybrids of farmer and financier, who speak as knowledgeably about the first of the fiddlehead ferns as they do about net worth and capital gains.

Now for the writing, which buoyed me along even in the slow, quotidian first section.

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 girls with candles in paper cups, it’s the cry of the rabbit when your father slit its throat, it’s the sound of your wife whispering in a dream that’s not about you.

I can't recall many fully realized "guncles" in fiction, but Nathan's and especially Violet's love for Robbie resonated with my own experience, if mostly on holdiays.

Robbie will be back soon, and when he’s back, the world will not only make more sense, it’ll be more thoroughly infused with jokes and hope, with the sparkling bounty, the bigheartedness, Robbie took with him when he went away.

And now for the epiphany that brought me to tears:  Isabel observes how her brother's friendship with Dan at an early age--somewhat scarily, she marries Dan for that reason before the internet provides Robbie and her with a technical alternative to their semi-incestuous vibe--gave him the confidence to become himself.  Something similarly non-sexual happened to me during college when rooming with an Olympic athlete whose aura of cool validated my own emerging personality.  It's something I never had considered prior to reading Day but it really struck a nerve nearly 50 years after the fact.

I just wish I hadn't read The Mill and the Floss.  It's a terrific spoiler.  Move over Virginia.  Michael has moved on to George, acquitting himself equally well.