Michael Cunningham’s Day Is a Timeless Exploration of a Very Specific Moment

Michael Cunningham is one of the best writers putting words on the page today. Lyrical and elegant, his style is instantly recognizable, and his delicate stories and beautiful turns of phrase stay with you well past the final period. Perhaps it is due to his almost otherworldly command of language, but Cunningham is also particularly deft at giving voice to the things (and people) we often struggle to understand. Personally, I always come back to his Pulitzer Prize winner The Hours, a story that takes its inspiration from a Virginia Woolf novel that I viscerally hated during college English literature, but which this particular novel made me see in an entirely new (and much kinder) way. Perhaps it is in that same spirit that we should approach his latest work, Day, a story that attempts to find meaning—and possibly even promise—in our collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Day is Cunningham’s first novel in nearly a decade (since 2014’s The Snow Queen), a quiet, introspective pandemic story that never actually says the word pandemic at all. It doesn’t put a name to the terror creeping through our days in 2020 or attempt to explain the origins of the event that rearranged our lives so thoroughly in the year that followed. But we know, and in that, we bear witness. As its title implies, the events of Day are set on the fifth day of April across three different years: 2019, in the world we still remember as normal; 2020, in the early months of lockdown; and finally 2021, when the arrival of vaccines convinced many the worst had passed. The story’s first act is set in the morning, its second at midday, and its third in the evening, and each work together to explore love, loss, anxiety, and the crushing uncertainty of just what we’re all meant to be doing here. 

Day follows a Brooklyn family: Isabel, a hypercompetent photo editor who fears what she’ll do when the industry inevitably craters; her aging former rock star husband Dan, who is trying to find a way back to the stage; and their two children, angsty pre-teen Nathan and precocious elementary student Violet. However, it’s Isabel’s younger brother Robbie who largely holds their family together. A school teacher who offers a sympathetic ear, a stabilizing presence, part-time childcare, fashion advice, and funny stories about his own dismal love life, he’s charming, if a bit directionless, and wonders whether his decision to turn down medical school in the name of grading sixth-grade papers about Christopher Columbus was the right choice. 

Despairing after another relationship has cratered, Robbie turns to social media for a serotonin boost, crafting a fake Instagram profile as “Wolfe”, a figure based on the imaginary older brother he and Isabel made up as children. (And a nod to Cunningham’s lifelong fascination with author Virginia Woolfe Woolf.)  Imaginary Wolfe has everything together: A handsome, thirtysomething pediatrician, he’s someone that everyone wants to like—and be like—even when Robbie’s sloppy social media management should make it obvious that Wolfe’s identity is cobbled together from photos borrowed without permission from strangers and the dreams of a country house the siblings once shared.  But when Isabel decides Nathan and Violet are too old to be sharing a room, she asks Robbie to move out of the attic apartment atop their attic brownstone, and everything changes—-in more ways than any of them could have expected.

A year later, Robbie is trapped in Iceland as international borders close around the world, young Violet is stuck doing remote learning and anxiously reminding her family of all the ways they could let the sickness into their home, Nathan is sneaking out to see friends, and Isabel is trapped in a liminal space, both literally and figuratively, as she struggles to figure out what she wants out of a life she’s not sure so recognizes any longer. As Day’s story moves into its final third, all its characters face an aftermath—-changed, in ways both large and small by the things they’ve experienced, and the way the pandemic has altered both their desires and their understanding of who they are. 

More concerned with internal struggles rather than larger societal upheaval, Day is a pandemic story that isn’t all that concerned with the specifics of the pandemic its characters are surviving. The arrival of COVID-19 is an inciting incident, to be sure, and the experience of it—lockdowns, travel restrictions, Zoom school, and remote work—-certainly takes its toll on the majority of the characters we meet within its pages. But, like many of Cunningham’s works, Day is a predominantly interior story and one that uses the seemingly dull minutiae of everyday life to explore bigger, more existential questions. 

Set the liminal space of the transition from one kind of world to another, Day wrestles with traumas both physical and literal. Who we are is no longer who we were, afterward, is it? It couldn’t possibly be, not when we’ve wrestled with death and loss and become people who’ve survived the unimaginable. How do we know when we’ve outgrown who we were? Or recalibrate our idea of who we should become, now that we know time is perhaps more finite than we once thought? If you’ve read Cunningham before, you know that he’s not interested in presenting easy answers to any of those questions, but rather exploring why we’re asking them in the first place. 

Day’s 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. This is, in part, a book about middle-aged disillusionment, about the realization that you don’t—and probably never will—have the life you envisioned when you were young enough to, as Dan and Robbie do, join a rock band or road trip across the country to see what is only the world’s second-largest ball of twine. But it is also a book about what comes afterward—the hopefulness that often stands in hand with change. 

Day is available now. 

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB