He couldn’t help but write pandemic novel
Cunningham felt it wouldn’t be contemporary work without subject
Michael Cunningham has a gnawing suspicion that his books are boring. He can’t shake the feeling, he said, not even four decades and eight novels into his career, not even after winning a Pulitzer Prize and selling millions of copies of “The Hours.”
“I don’t know if this is my biggest neurosis or just among my neuroses,” he said cheerfully while sitting in his office, a tiny, bookfilled studio in Greenwich Village, one afternoon in late July. “But I have this thing, and it’s hard for me to shake.”
As a young writer, that fear led him to abandon book after book. Even now, as he has learned to manage, if not silence, his inner critic, it can still derail him, causing him to underwrite and gloss over things, he said.
“If you can’t exorcise your little writing demons, you’re going to at least learn to identify them. So, I’ve got some little entities sitting on my left shoulder, saying, ‘Oh, shut up,’ ” he said, using an expletive. “‘This is just going on too long.’ ”
Cunningham, 71, had to suppress those doubts again while writing “Day,” his first novel in nearly a decade.
The book, which Random House recently published, is an intimate story about a New York family that’s barely weathering the abrasions of daily life when a pandemic strikes, throwing them into forced proximity while driving them further apart. It has arrived at a strange moment, when the coronavirus remains an ever-present and grudgingly
tolerated threat, but the pandemic and its aftermath are largely absent from film, television and literature. Although some prominent writers — including Ann Patchett, Ian McEwan, Gary Shteyngart, Elizabeth Strout and Sigrid Nunez — have woven the pandemic into their work, most fiction writers seem to be ignoring the subject.
For Cunningham, it wasn’t much of a choice. Although he never used the words COVID-19 or pandemic or even virus in the novel, Cunningham felt the coronavirus had to be part of the fabric of his characters’ lives.
“How does anybody,” he said, “write a contemporary novel that’s about human beings that’s not about the pandemic?”
“Day” unfolds in three acts, each set on a single day in April over three successive years. The novel opens on the morning of April 5, 2019, when Isabel, who works at a magazine, and her husband, Dan, a washed-up rock singer turned stay-at-home dad, struggle to get their two children to school. Amid the daily chaos, Isabel’s brother, Robbie, a teacher who lives with them and is secretly in love with
Dan, holds the household together.
The second section begins in the afternoon on April 5, 2020, as the pandemic paralyzes New York City. Isabel and Dan are quarantined at home with their two children, a confinement that causes their already fraying marriage to unravel further. Isabel sits alone on the stairs, scrolling through her phone; Dan posts videos of his songs on YouTube and develops a rabid online fan base. Their 6-year-old daughter, Violet, is terrified that the virus will float in through the windows. Robbie, who has quit his teaching job, gets stranded in Iceland alone in a cabin, where he maintains a fake Instagram persona of a man named Wolfe.
The final act, set on the evening of April 5, 2021, takes place upstate, in a dilapidated country home outside the city, where Isabel lives. The family is shattered by grief and loss that is particular to their clan but feels omnipresent.
“He’s written one of, if not the, best novels about the pandemic that I’ve encountered, but it’s also a novel about everyday life,” said writer Susan Choi, a close friend of Cunningham’s. “What he did with the idea of a day, and taking a day from each of those particular years, reflects how all of us as a planet are still trying to process those three years in our lives.”
Virginia Woolf, whose presence has hovered over Cunningham’s work like a patron saint, called the ordinary but profound
moments that define a person’s life “moments of being.” “Day” is built almost entirely from such moments. Asked how he arrived at the novel’s structure, Cunningham invoked Woolf, whose novel “Mrs. Dalloway” takes place in a single day and inspired “The Hours.”
“I do have to give credit to Virginia Woolf for helping me understand that a novel can have real scope without being physically large and without spanning a great deal of time,” Cunningham said. “That there’s meaning at the cosmos, but there’s also meaning at the subatomic level.”
Cunningham worried
about making sure “Day” matched the gravity of the moment without being too heavy or “operatic.” He fretted about the ending, aiming to strike “some balance between, ‘And then everything was fine,’ and total despair,” he said.
When he sent a draft to Andy Ward, his editor at Random House, Ward expected the multigenerational saga, which Cunningham had sold to Random House years before based on a partial manuscript. After getting over his initial surprise that Cunningham had written a contemporary pandemic novel, Ward was quickly sucked in.
“It’s the air that we
breathe in this novel, it’s the backdrop to it, but it’s not about COVID,” Ward said. “He creates stories out of these small human moments, but he sets them against these much larger destructive forces.”
Even now, though, Cunningham can’t help but think about the better book he might have written — another of his untamed writerly neuroses.
“For me, the finished book is surrounded by various nimbuses, visible only to me, of the various other ways it could have been written,” he said. “And then, all that is surrounded, also visible only to me, by the impossibly great book that no one can write.”