Michael Cunningham on new novel, 'Day'

In Michael Cunningham’s new novel “Day,” which he discussed with WAMC’s “The Book Show” host Joe Donahue at The White Hart Inn in Salisbury, Conn., the night of Thursday, Nov. 30, a New York family faces changes over the course of three years. 

Like his 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Hours,” Cunningham’s first novel in a decade is a triptych, told in three parts. The story begins on the morning of April 5, 2019, moves forward to the afternoon of April 5, 2020, and concludes on the evening of April 5, 2021.

“There’s the Holy Trinity, the three-act play. We are consistently drawn to the number three,” Cunningham told Donahue. “Any two beings, objects, can only be in proximity to one another. You see this napkin…” he held up his cocktail napkin and water glass to demonstrate his point. “You can always draw a straight line between the napkin and the glass. If you add a third element, endless permutations are possible. At the subatomic level, an atom of hydrogen, a nucleus with one electron, behaves entirely predictably. An atom of something like helium, an atom with two electrons — it’s impossible to tell how it will behave. When two storm systems are in proximity, they just go on, side by side. When the third one joins, it’s a hurricane.”

In addition to the novel’s three acts, the story centers on three adults cohabitating in a Brooklyn brownstone: former high school golden boy Dan, now married to his wife, Isabel, as well as Isabel’s younger brother Robbie, who moves in with the pair, often acting as a third, or even primary parent to the couple’s two children. Cunningham described the unconventional family unit as “Not quite good enough to be good, but not quite bad enough to dissolve… Dan and Isabel are screwing the kids up and are helpless in the face of it. The marriage is fraying, and they’re doing the best they can, but they are complicit in the novel. They are watching in horror as their inability to continue loving each other harms their children.”

Robbie’s presence further strains the relationship, as a triangle of affection disrupts the status quo of the cozy brownstone. “Dan and Isabel are each, in their own way, in love with Robbie,” said Cunningham. “Dan flirts with Robbie with a clear understanding that Robbie’s not going to make a move or anything. So it’s this atmosphere in which Dan, for complicated reasons, feels free to be flirtatious with Robbie. One of my favorite quotes is from Oscar Wilde, who said, ‘Everything in the world is really about sex except sex. Sex is really about power.’”

Though COVID-19 and the pandemic are never named directly, the isolation created for New Yorkers forced to remain in their homes weighs heavily on the middle section of the novel, set in April 2020. Cunningham said, while he wanted to avoid the trappings of the post-COVID novel, he was keenly interested in the early responses to the crisis, the fastidious washing of groceries, the loneliness and the paranoia. He felt a contemporary novel set in New York couldn’t overlook the emotional toll of the outbreak. “I didn’t want to write a pandemic novel, yet it would have felt like setting a novel in London during World War II without mentioning the Blitz.”

Besides attending The White Hart event, sponsored by Oblong Books in Millerton, N.Y., the New York City-based writer has another Connecticut connection — his 14-year teaching position at the English department of Yale University in New Haven, Conn. “The students are amazing. I teach a literature class that is really about craft. We do a lot of reading, but the implied question is: Virginia Woolf picks up the dictionary and finds ‘The Lighthouse’ in it, then Toni Morrison picks up the same dictionary and finds ‘Beloved.’ How do they do that?”