Day

Michael Cunningham

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, March 9th 2024

There is a beautiful stillness about Michel Cunningham’s new novel, which is one of a growing number of stories attempting to capture the essence of life during COVID-19. As the title suggests, the story, which details the slow disintegration of the family, details the events of a single day – April 5 – but spreads its 24 hours across three consecutive years. It is a brilliant conceit, trapping both character and reader in a moment of stasis amid unseen and irrevocable change. The overall effect is simultaneously claustrophobic and calming, a perfect evocation of the lockdown experience.

The morning’s events take place in 2019 when Robbie, a 6^th-grade history teacher, is preparing to move out of the house he has shared with his sister Isabel and her husband Dan since they bought it 10 years earlier. Not that he wants to go – he is as much a partner in the marriage as the happy couple – but the children need rooms of their own, and maybe it’s time for Robbie, too, to move on in his own life.

Afternoon, which takes place in 2020, sees Isabel and Dan trapped in Covid isolation with their increasingly fractious children. Desperate for space and time alone, Isabel spends her time on the stairs of their apartment while Dan works on reviving his youthful dream of musical stardom. Robbie, meanwhile, is stranded in an isolated Swiss cottage, present only in unsent letters, his absence keenly felt in the fraying strands of familial relationships.

Evening 2021 finds the family, now separated, drawn together again by Robbie (whose absence is now irrevocable and painfully permanent) and on the brink of yet another reconfiguration, the outcome of which remains unclear.

Cunningham uses multiple viewpoints to capture a range of experiences of that time, from Isabel’s realisation that she has allowed her life to drift into a configuration that no longer satisfies her needs to Dan’s brother Garth, a responsibility-shy artist whose ascension to fatherhood (via an obligation-free sperm donation to his friend Chess) is mutually understood to carry no paternal obligation beyond the biological. For Garth, lockdown sparks the desire for connection, while Chess revels in the small and insular world she has created for herself and her baby.

With so much action taking place off-stage, the novel’s quietness provides the perfect setting in which Cunningham is free to explore his characters and themes with depth and delicacy. Day is a story of everyday life that encompasses the complexities of love and grief, regret for choices made and opportunities lost, and the potential for change that brings with it both hope and peril, like the spring that waits just beyond the horizon of early April. The tension between movement and stasis in its structure mirrors that of the family as a whole. It perfectly captures the evanescent few months we swore would change the world, but which, as we move into 2024, already feel like a fever dream.