The rule of thirds is a compositional principle in photography: an image is divided into three equal parts to achieve maximum aesthetic tension. For the writer Michael Cunningham, the rule of thirds also applies to the novel.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, the course of a single day is shared among three women, spliced into three separate narratives by time and place. In A Home at the End of the World, a gay man, his childhood best friend, and his best friend’s lover attempt to raise a child together.
“Three is the first truly interesting number,” said Cunningham at a talk he gave on Day at the Brookline Booksmith on Nov. 15. “It’s the number of chaos.”
Cunningham — who also wrote Land’s End, a 2002 essayistic book on Provincetown — has returned with another triptych in his eighth novel, Day, published last month by Penguin Random House. Set in three parts over the course of three years, this intimate tale focuses on a slowly fissuring family in Brooklyn on April 5, 2019, 2020, and 2021. We meet them in the morning in 2019, wade with them through the afternoon in 2020, and leave them in the evening in 2021.
Like many Cunningham works, the novel proceeds at a slow clip yet still makes for a fast read. The day begins at sunrise. Isabel Walker sits on the stoop of her rowhouse apartment, bracing herself for the wearying churn of daily life — an omnipresent theme in Cunningham’s oeuvre. Isabel, a hardened photo editor at an arts magazine in Manhattan, is married to Dan Byrne, a once almost-famous rock star and former addict. Living in the attic is Isabel’s younger gay brother, Robbie, who turned down medical school to teach sixth-grade history and is mourning a recent breakup.
Both Isabel and Dan are in love, more or less platonically, with Robbie, who embodies an ideal image of young adulthood they lost to the births of their two children. Nathan is 10 and obsessed with video games and accessing the good graces of his cruel friends. Violet is five and already has an eye for the gaudy, insisting on wearing an aquamarine tulle gown to school. Despite the family’s enchantment, Isabel and Dan are evicting Robbie to make room for Nathan as the kids grow too old to share a room.
As the morning progresses, a rupture between the couple begins to show itself: Isabel finds herself crying on the subway as Dan locks himself behind closed doors in his latest attempts to resuscitate his music career. The rupture is “more erosion than romantic catastrophe,” Cunningham writes, and the couple knows that the erosion will only hasten once Robbie, the glue that binds them, moves out.
Cunningham’s depiction of an imperfect marriage is nimbly subdued, a subtle foreshadowing of what the reader expects to come. “I’m interested in the first crack of the plaster, rather than the day the house falls down,” Cunningham said.
Behind this crack, readers familiar with Cunningham’s work will find a trope oft visited in his novels. Isabel, who adores her life as a wife and mother, also reviles it and daydreams of escaping to a country house up the Hudson River. Though tweaked to meet the conventions of this century, Isabel risks feeling too closely redolent of some of Cunningham’s previous, more fully realized characters.
As the second part of the book opens — on the afternoon of April 5, 2020 — the family becomes trapped in early lockdown, when the world still thought it had to disinfect its groceries. Notably omitted from this section are the words “pandemic” and “Covid-19.” Instead, Cunningham refers obliquely to the virus as “it” and “the thing.”
Cunningham said that this central omission is a way of “naming the unnamable.” The wounds are still fresh in our collective conscious: “I don’t want to write a pandemic novel; I don’t want to read a pandemic novel,” he said. This reluctance, however, at times renders the prose uncertain of itself, occupied with how the reader will react knowing that the wounds of Lysol on produce are still raw.
Cunningham is nevertheless able to skillfully employ Covid-19 as a vehicle to hasten the shift in the family dynamic: Isabel finds herself spending more time on the apartment’s stoop, Dan shifts all remaining vestiges of his attention away from his family and to his music, Nathan is sneaking his friends into his newly christened attic unit, and Violet slips deeper into her own glittery world.
Missing is Robbie, who finds himself trapped in Iceland weeks after borders across the globe closed. As most people were at the apex of the pandemic, the three lovers, Robbie, Isabel, and Dan, have been thrust into a virtual existence where the fraying ties between them are precariously held together by Instagram posts, text messages, and emails. Cunningham tackles this modern entanglement, dedicating chapters to virtual exchanges in which the characters try but fail to fully reach each other.
This messy virtual sphere is compounded by a pet project Robbie began with Isabel of an Instagram personality they invented, a pediatrician named “Wolfe,” using photos from the far corners of the internet. As Robbie hunkers down in bucolic Iceland, he begins posting photos he takes of his surroundings, blurring the once taut line between Wolfe’s fictional life and Robbie’s real one, while Isabel’s jealousy of Robbie’s seemingly picturesque world mounts.
In Day, Cunningham manages to make Covid-19 both the central drama and entirely beside the point. He is smart to shirk global commentary for his quintessential poeticization of the mundane: the owl that Isabel spots on the stoop of her apartment on a morning in April 2019; the owl that lives outside a country house in upstate New York where the family convenes two years later on an April evening in 2021, after something in the family has indelibly shifted. Although the owl is now silent, Isabel knows it’s still there.
By zooming in on the finest of details, Cunningham beautifully reveals the sweeping tides of a family in their daily rhythms. Day is about time elapsing, which, Cunningham admits, is true for any novel. All elevator pitches can be boiled down to one simple remark, he jokes: “I hope you like this — it’s about the effects of the passage of time.”
How the effects of time on this family touch a reader perhaps all depends on how ready one is to face the recent Lysol past.
