Reviews of Specimen Days:
"In Specimen Days, Cunningham, whose skill and stature as a novelist seem to grow prodigiously with each new work, has produced one of the most luminous and penetrating novels to appear this year."
"Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days is an extraordinary book, as ambitious as it is generous; and the depth of its kindness, or grace, is to convey that it is we ourselves, the multitude, who are extraordinary, or might be . . . I promise you fun, marvels, adventure, love stories, plus the uninhibited exercise of a great natural writer and an inspired historian . . . This is a transforming book, the lovely, tattered record of our time and place, and of our wish to prevail."
"[Specimen Days is] . . . another stunning work . . . It is a rich reading experience, going from the brutal factory scenes to the thriller of the middle section, and then on to the brave new world of the final section. Cunningham has made something substantively and stylistically bold out of these stories, keeping his many fires stoked and pulling the parts together as a brilliant whole."
"Specimen Days offers just about every kind of literary pleasure, and all of them in abundance: suspense, hilarity, invention, romance and passage after passage of breathtaking prose. By its quietly tragic end, the reader, like several of the characters, has gone heavenward."
"Intricately conceived, stylishly written and admirably ambitious, this absorbing novel lingers in the mind."
"Cunningham's most ambitious novel, and his finest."
"Cunningham cares most passionately (and most knowingly) about the largest and most hopeful human experiences: compassion, community, art, connection- the infinite manifestations of love. It is his unique moral vision that successfully hinges three distinct narrative panels into a triptych of unified beauty. It's what raises his individual stories out of their genres into the glorious realm of art. "
"It is a love song of a novel, rich and melancholy and overflowing with smartness . . ."
"A highly literary, engrossing thriller."
"Another dazzling tour de force."
"[Walt Whitman's] boundless spirit . . . imbues Specimen Days with a sense of wonder and magic."
"Engaging Walt Whitman as his muse, Cunningham weaves a captivating, strange and extravagant novel of human progress and social decline. Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, the novel tells three stories separated in time. But here, the stage is the same (the 'glittering, blighted' city of Manhattan), the actors mirror each other (a deformed, Whitman-quoting boy, Luke, is a terrorist in one story and a teenage prophet in another; a world-weary woman, Catherine, is a would-be bride and an alien; and a handsome young man, Simon, is a ghost, a business man and an artificial human) and weighty themes (of love and fear, loss and connection, violence and poetry) reverberate with increasing power . . . This is daring, memorable fiction."
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (1998), Cunningham boldly improvised on Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's masterpiece. Here Walt Whitman is his literary muse as the poet's cosmic sensibility inspires unexpected revelations and courses of action. Once again, Cunningham has constructed an elegant triptych of tales about a trio of characters in different times and guises, but he has taken a quantum leap imaginatively, stylistically, and thematically in this bewitching novel of a metamorphosing New York City . . . Brilliantly conceived, empathic, darkly humorous, and gorgeously rendered, Cunningham's galvanizing novel [is] about the quest for justice and freedom, the parameters of the soul, the hunger for beauty, and the fluid interface between the natural and the engineered."
"Michael Cunningham showed in The Hours how a living imagination can make new from old: new language, new stories, new art. You night say he's done that again with Specimen Days—instead of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, he uses Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass—but this novel has a very different purpose and effect. It is not Cunningham's ambition here to open up the appropriated text and explore it from new angles. Crucial lines from the Whitman poem appear in Specimen Days like light beams shining on Cunningham's deeper excavation, which his attempt (in far-removed but haunting images and themes) to come to terms—historically, psychically, and spiritually—with the events, the deaths, and the brutal and blundering aftermath of September 11, 2001. With imaginative daring and sentiment hardened by intellect and pain, Cunningham constructs three tales of New York . . . This is an astonishing accomplishment and the best book Cunningham has written."
"The method of The Hours is even more brilliantly employed in Specimen Days, Cunningham's fifth novel, which tells three interrelated stories set in New York City in the historical past, near-present and imagined future. Each focuses on three characters: a physically or genetically deformed boy, a bereaved woman and a man whose fate influence, or is influenced by, their actions . . . The use of several recurring images (an ornamental white bowl, a fire in a sewing machine factory) and Whitman's visionary idealism superbly underscore a symphonic poem of sorrow, loss, survival—and hope: Cunningham's finest novel, and one of the important literary achievements of the new century."
"Specimen Days is really three individually compelling stories that together form something greater. Cunningham's audacious eye, his ability to hone an unexpected image from an unlikely source, is in sharp focus, and the prowess he showed in The Hours for getting inside his character's heads is still in evidence."