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 ... In a novel as thinly plotted as Day, everything depends upon the exquisite flow of Cunningham’s language, but quotations don’t do his work justice.
You have to read these sentences yourself in context ... Aging, along with its attendant separations and swelling sense of irrelevance, is the novel’s abiding preoccupation. I would accuse Cunningham of projecting his 71-year-old anxieties, but these characters, barely middle-aged, are wholly convincing exemplars of America’s new lost generation. At their backs they always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near.
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 ... In this novel that puzzles over the elasticity of all kinds of love — familial, parental, erotic, queer, fraternal, ambiguous — I yearned for Cunningham to forget his literary peers and stick with his own special talent ... When Cunningham writes like himself, and not like an apostle, he is one of love’s greatest witnesses.
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 ... By the end, the members of the family seem to have laid their ghosts to rest: They’re reconciled to moving forward and to living in conflicts that have come to seem almost jolly. The peace seems a little willed, but maybe a critique is implied there, too.
You can count on elegance and erudition when you pick up a Cunningham novel ... Infuses the pandemic into his trademark elements. It may be that his command of fictional structure and interiority constrains his capacity to grapple with monumental social upheaval. Or he could be grappling with the possibility that the upheaval of the pandemic was in the end more muted than cataclysmic for the bourgeois bohemians he narrates so deftly. Either way, Day expands the canon of consummate Cunningham but does little to increase our understanding of the pandemic or its literary possibilities ... Cunningham excels at articulating the ways his characters experience themselves and their efforts to inhabit their roles — as well as the understandings and misunderstandings with which they encounter each other ... His characters’ outcomes could as easily have been catalyzed by a murder or hurricane; his fictional output is another exquisite Cunningham novel. Meanwhile, I wish I could have read that multigeneration saga.
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 ... The characters’ meditations are now accompanied by the requisite handwringing about 'white lady problems' and 'decadent unhappiness' ... Ironic distancing is lethal to a writer who relies so much on sensory immersion. I usually begin Mr. Cunningham’s books rolling my eyes at his cossetted characters but finish them thoroughly won over, enchanted by the magic of the prose. With Day, which feels flatter and more ballasted by present sensibilities, my skepticism never dispersed.
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 ... Best appreciated on the structural and sentence levels. Cunningham writes beautifully, and pulls off one sharp observation after another ... A sad story of middle-aged disillusionment. It's about losses that range from a 'low howl' to the unbearable. It's about the belated end of blithely delayed maturity and the premature end of childhood. But it's also about taking stock and making changes before it's too late. It isn't without hope.
A quiet, introspective pandemic story that never actually says the word pandemic at all ... Its appeal ultimately lies not in the specificity of its story, but in the universality of its experience, a story not just of collective trauma, but the opportunity for transformation it offers.
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.
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.
