Day
Michael Cunningham
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Day
Michael Cunningham
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
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.
I always hate these sorts of plot summaries in reviews — a bunch of characters caught up in trivial-sounding minutiae: Who cares? But Cunningham beautifully pries apart the notion of what it means to have outgrown something, to be living in the liminal space between an earlier self and a future self.
If the kindness between Cunningham’s characters stretches beyond strict verisimilitude, it’s part of their charm. The nervous, meandering dialogue, witty without being aggressively so, is pleasant to listen in on.
You can count on elegance and erudition when you pick up a Cunningham novel.
Themes of nature and nurture, the tyranny of the marriage plot and the complex reality of family constellations — often shaped by accident and contingency — recur in a fluent, if slightly weightless, tale..
The apology bug appears to have bitten him.
While ingeniously conceived, Day strains to hit the high notes of The Hours. The biggest obstacle is its characters. It is hard to engage and fully empathize with their problems, which are mainly late 30-something disappointments that life is not living up to expectations.
A quiet, introspective pandemic story that never actually says the word pandemic at all.
Written with caressing attention to its characters, a kind of long massage that seeks out tiny subcutaneous knots..
Cunningham brilliantly and skillfully demonstrates how such contradictions are possible..
Day has a dreamy, timeless feel. Using gorgeous, often heightened prose, Cunningham offers intimate glimpses of weighty moments instead of big scenes to examine the family’s strands of connection and disconnection, along with the ripple effects of the pandemic. Day may be a spare, short novel, but it’s a novel that asks to be read meditatively, rather than rushed through..
[An] intimate portrait.
Writing with empathy, insight, keen observation, and elegant subtlety, Cunningham reveals something not only about the characters whose lives he limns in these pages, but also about the crises and traumas, awakenings and opportunities for growth the world writ large experienced during a particularly challenging era—and about the way people found a way to connect with one another and themselves as individuals in a time heightened by love and loss. This subtle, sensitively written family story proves poignant and quietly powerful..