Hunter writes with powerful specificity about sensation—the experience, bodily, of moving though the world ...
As so many literary novelists working today do, Hunter leans heavily on lyrical description and imagery. Dialogue is scant in Days of Light, and the plot is simple. The author clearly cares more about how the writing makes the reader feel, and the luminous images it evokes, than about weaving a story that will reveal Ivy’s character.
The strategy falls flat. By only choosing the most important days, Hunter is trying to have it both ways: to immerse us in the inner world of a single character but keep the action spicy too. The result is that neither really comes off ... Many readers will enjoy the images of genuine lyrical beauty in Days of Light...but the novel concludes in the same state of suspension that Ivy was experiencing on page 1. It was odd: I spent six decades with a character but finished the book feeling that I didn’t know her at all.
The early parts of the novel are a vividly immersive delight ... As the years pass, though, the book loses some of its early momentum. Novels like David Nicholls’s One Day may make it look easy, but a satisfying narrative that contains itself to only a handful of days is extremely hard to pull off.
Continuing the story into 1965 and, finally, 1999 provides a neat structure, Hunter offering a single day in Ivy’s life each time ... Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours are novels that repeatedly came to my mind as I was reading, for the language employed, the character traits, the time slips, and the deeply interior and sensitive perceptions are common to all. But there’s something a little calculated about the writing here that makes it feel like an exercise in style rather than a work of authentic fiction ... Eventually, every novelist must decide the type of writer they want to be: someone who mimics successful formulae or hopes to create their own. For all of Megan Hunter’s obvious talent, I wonder if it’s time for her to make that choice.
