artificially manufactured main character has been programmed with Whitman's lines in order to modify aspects of his personality. There are other "manufactureds" walking around encoded with lines from Shelley, Milton and so forth.
Michael Cunningham has been highly praised, and The Hours won two major prizes. But I think there is room for a dissenting view. He seems to me a sophisticated writer who attracts a refined readership. This is something very different from greatness. At worst Specimen Days oscillates between details intended to catch the eyes of film producers, and phrases that aim for high literary marks but in fact remain unmemorable. Cunningham lacks the grand overview that characterizes genuinely strong writers, the simplifying imagination that resolves problems in the author's sleep and comes up with the great and unforgettable scene the following morning.
This book's first story recreates early New York with care, and its second certainly anticipated the London suicide bombings of last July, as it does the loss of rights that may follow in the wake of terrorist acts. The darkly imagined distopia of the final episode, however, contains little that isn't already familiar from writers of science fiction.
This book has the feel of something pieced together over time, with the parallelisms between its three parts carefully arranged but hardly spontaneous. A contrasting use of its three-part structure might be Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol where the three embodiments of Christmas feel wholly natural and imaginatively compelling. Cunningham appears a fastidious writer, most at home perhaps in the pages of The New Yorker, rather than one destined for wide popularity or a permanent place in literature.
Perhaps his real forte is as an up-market script-writer (there's even a minor character in the book called Tomcruise). I for one will certainly go to see the film of this book when it's made, as it surely will be.
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