Books Worth Reading

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Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham (2005)

5 stars!

Walt said that the dead turned into grass, but there was no grass where they’d buried Simon.

Specimen Days is an unusual novel, beautifully written and gloriously strange — the best kind of novel, the kind that keeps you thinking and wondering long after the cover has been closed. The book is divided into three sections, each one connected by character, setting, iconic images and the poetry of Walt Whitman. In each section, the same three characters appear — a man, a woman and a deformed child — but each section is told from a different character’s point of view. Although it is never stated, I got the sense that reincarnation is at work, and each character in their new time is a continuation and evolution of who they were before.

The first section is set in Victorian New York, among sweatshops, ironworks and extreme poverty, in an age just beginning to become industrialized. The boy, so struck by Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (which he calls “the Book”) that he cannot help but recite lines from it at odd and inappropriate moments, has taken his dead brother’s job at a factory. He becomes convinced that ghosts haunt the machines around him and that the machines love the people who work them so much that they want to consume the people themselves. The boy feels compelled to save his brothers fiancee from such a fate.

The second section, set in present-day New York, follows a forensic psychologist for the NYC police department as she is caught up in a strange terrorist plot involving children blowing themselves and a randomly chosen stranger up in an effort to change the course of human history. The children, all unwanted and abandoned, were raised by a woman calling herself Walt Whitman in an apartment where the walls, floors and ceilings have been covered with pages from Leaves of Grass. For me, this was the most compelling section, although all three stories were fascinating.

The final story is set 150 years into the future. It begins in a New York that has devolved into an amusement park, but the story moves outside the confines of the city for the first time. The characters — an android who compulsively recites Whitman due to his “poetry chip,” an intelligent alien lizard and a deformed but wise young boy — go on a quest together that takes them across a ruined America to Denver and the promise of a more hopeful future. This was the strangest story of them all, but the common threads of character and theme keep it grounded.

Each story is ultimately about love: how it begins, how it can end and what it compels us to do for and to each other. But I think this novel is also a warning about how disconnected we are becoming from the Earth and nature — connection to nature is a strong theme in Leaves of Grass – and the inevitable consequences of that disconnect. Each time there is an attempt to reconnect, to alter the direction that society is going, and a failure to do so. But despite these failures, there is still hope — hope embodied in Whitman’s enduring words, in the persistence of love, in the continuing quest for a reunion with the natural world and the cosmos. The ultimate fate of that quest remains unknown as the novel ends, and there is hope in that too.