Lockdown may still be fresh in the collective memory, and Covid a lingering presence, but this novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham confirms that pandemic fiction is alive and well. Day is a dissection of a New York City household under a Covid microscope, and the most recent in this year’s run of lockdown novels from US authors including Sigrid Nunez, Elizabeth Strout and Ann Patchett.
For readers who feel it’s all too much, too soon – French philosopher Simone Weil famously wrote that “distance is the soul of beauty” – Cunningham is unapologetic. “How does anybody write a contemporary novel that’s about human beings that’s not about the pandemic?” he said in an interview. Of course, the pandemic offers ideal conditions for an author mining the inner lives of characters under pressure. Cunningham’s prizewinning 1998 hit The Hours took its cue from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, allowing its three central characters only one day each in the novel’s narrative. In this, his first novel in almost a decade, the action is compressed into a Covid timeline: the same April day in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
In Day’s opening act in 2019, 38-year-old Robbie is a frustrated school teacher living in a bedsit attached to the Brooklyn apartment owned by his older sister, Isabel, and her husband, Dan. Robbie’s professional and romantic life is a mess: he regrets an earlier decision to abandon his medical studies and is quietly in love with his ex-musician brother-in-law. He also adores and supports Isabel, who is exhausted by first-world dilemmas of her own.
“The trick now is to keep wanting it, the job as well as the marriage, motherhood, the stratospherically costly handbag,” Isabel confesses via the novel’s all-seeing narrator. “The trick is learning not to despise herself for her claustrophobia and disappointment.”
Robbie, meanwhile, is looking for somewhere else to live, to give his niece and nephew, Violet and Nathan, more space in the apartment. But the accommodation search has everyone on edge, as Robbie’s easy-going presence is clearly vital to the household’s fragile stability.
By April 2020, those fears have materialised: Robbie is stuck in Iceland, living off the grid in an isolated mountain cabin, and Isabel is in lockdown in New York, desperately missing her brother. She hides from Dan and her needy children in the dark stairwell of the apartment, while Robbie contemplates an Icelandic view that’s treed and grassy, “as if some god of the North had waved a titanic hand and simply said, ‘green’. It’s difficult to not think of gods here.”
If divinity is to be found anywhere in the novel, though, it’s in Cunningham’s omniscient presence. He inhabits not only the minds of Isabel and Robbie, the novel’s point-of-view is a baton passed seamlessly between all the characters. Revelations are sometimes brutal – “Dan can’t say when, exactly, he realised he’d expected Isabel to be grateful. He’d rather not know about the extent of his own vanity” – sometimes witty, and often sad. Six-year-old Violet misses her uncle so much she won’t be reassured the Brooklyn apartment’s windows are safe to open at all. By 2021, adolescent Nathan is also in crisis, his family’s loves and losses almost too much to bear.
There’s nothing aloof about Day: Cunningham has written a novel from deep inside a pandemic, not about it. For some, this beautifully crafted view of a family in a world of upheaval may be too close for comfort, but it’s impossible to look away.
