Observation is an essential skill for writers, but observation without incisiveness is just a laundry list. Cunningham has the skill, the incisiveness and the passion to turn observation into profundity.

This is not a plot-based novel. It’s a quiet, compelling narrative in which, by going through the mundanities of daily living, characters are revealed (to others and the readers, rather than to themselves).

Isabel lives with husband, Dan, and kids, Nathan and Violet. Her brother, Robbie, lives upstairs in their New York apartment for the moment, but Nathan is getting older and will need his own room. Dan’s brother, Garth, has fathered a child with Chess. She needed his sperm to produce her son, Odin; she doesn’t want to share her life with him. This is the ensemble cast whose lives are dissected on separate days one year apart.

The morning of 5 April 2019 has an air of possibility. Robbie will find a new apartment. Isabel and Dan will find a way to work through their marriage. Garth will mature. Chess might let him into her life. Nathan will be the cool kid. Violet will astound her parents as much as she already does Robbie.

In the bright afternoon light of 5 April 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, possible roads to the future become dead ends. Then, in the evening of 5 April 2021 it’s a time for reflection on yesterdays and the expectation of tomorrows.

Cunningham’s characters live in an ‘intricate mix of concurrence and opposition’, where life is ultimately unknowable. His writing echoes the ‘tunnelling’ literary device of Virginia Woolf, where the narrative voice moves from one character’s consciousness to another. Utterly brilliant writing.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rarely missing a telling detail or a larger emotional truth, Michael Cunningham masterfully explores the quiet, private moments of a life. Crediting Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway with allowing him to entertain “the wild hope” of being a writer, Cunningham deftly evokes fleeting thoughts and states of consciousness in his books.

Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1952 and grew up in La Cañada, California. He received his B.A. in English Literature from Stanford University and his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. His novel A Home at the End of the World was published in 1990 to wide acclaim.

Flesh and Blood, another novel, followed in 1995. He received the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel, The Hours. He has written one nonfiction book, Land’s End: A Walk Through Provincetown. He is the author of Specimen Days, and By Nightfall which has been optioned for the movies.

Michael Cunningham is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award (1995), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1988), and a Michener Fellowship from the University of Iowa (1982). He is currently a senior lecturer in the English department at Yale University.

Visit Michael Cunningham’s agent’s website