Looking back to see where you’re headed

Like his Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Hours,” Michael Cunningham’s new novel, “Specimen Days,” is a trio of narratives juxtaposed in a way that makes 1+1+1 equal a whole lot more than three. In “The Hours,” Cunningham cut up his stories (two set in the past, one in the present, each haunted in its own way by Virginia Woolf and “Mrs. Dalloway”) and restitched them in a manner that evoked Woolf’s kinetic writing. Here Cunningham hangs his panels side by side, three novellas of past, present and future unified by locale, character and, most grandly, moral vision. His setting is mostly New York City, particularly Lower Manhattan. Each section features the same trio of characters reincarnated at three points in time: the mid-19th century; today; and late in the 21st century, after a nuclear meltdown has left much of the middle part of the country uninhabitable.

There’s Simon, an ironworks operator who becomes a futures trader and returns as a simulo, or artificial human; Catherine, a seamstress reimagined as Cat, a forensic psychologist, and then replaced by Catareen, an alien with skin as green and slick as a leaf; and finally Luke or Lucas, who transforms from a boy who hears ghosts to a child terrorist with a pipe bomb duct-taped to his chest to a born-again Christian who climbs aboard a spaceship to emigrate to a planet in another solar system. If this sounds extravagant, complicated and exciting, it is.

Cunningham connects his characters and their moments in time via the hovering spirit of Walt Whitman and “Leaves of Grass.” Once you recognize the source, lines from the great American epic appear everywhere -- sort of like how, once you start looking for it, the spray-paint signature of a graffiti artist suddenly pops up all over town. A boy quotes Whitman rather than speaking for himself on the big subjects of love and death and the cosmos. A terroristic godmother has wallpapered every surface of her Rivington Street apartment with pages of the poem. An android has been programmed with it in order to introduce moral reasoning into his code. If in “The Hours” Cunningham borrowed Woolf’s style and sensibility to create a sui generis work of art, here he’s weaving with Whitman’s actual words and, more subtly, his soul.

Part One, called “In the Machine,” is a 19th century ghost story that at first will remind you of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw” but actually owes as much to his equally unsettling, anti-capitalistic “In the Cage.” It’s about a boy whose brother has been killed in an industrial accident, eaten by the iron teeth of a machine he operates. Lucas takes over his brother’s job in the ironworks and soon starts hearing Simon, as the section’s title suggests, in the machine.

Cunningham’s point, or one of his points, is that the world shifted for the worse with industrialization. The machine has consumed us and this was the beginning of the end. That’s a valid but pessimistic point of view, and it doesn’t fit perfectly with Whitman’s sophisticated optimism and his belief in the future. In the same way, when Lucas quotes “Leaves of Grass,” it sometimes feels forced and unnatural, even within the open boundaries of a supernatural story. The intellectualizing is too apparent; the novelist’s prints smudge the scene. Yet these weak points hardly tarnish an otherwise powerful and complex dramatization of New York at the dawn of a great and terrible age. This section ends with a spectacular fire at a shirtwaist factory in the Village, where garment workers must choose between incineration or leaping to their deaths while the city watches from the sidewalk below. If that brings to mind the twin horrors of the Triangle garment factory blaze and 9/11, then you’re ready to turn the page.

The novel’s middle section, “The Children’s Crusade,” is Cunningham’s most commanding performance and one of the best police thrillers I’ve ever read. It’s about a forensic psychologist chasing a group of child suicide terrorists who are randomly hugging people on the streets and then blowing themselves up. The terrorists quote Whitman and work for someone named Walt. Cat can stop the terror and save one of these children only by making sense of “Leaves of Grass.” Here Cunningham’s use of Whitman’s poetry feels more organic to the story and less like a literary device. It serves as a source of natural clues, as well as emotional insight, in a mystery so engrossing and poignant that you’ll wish that Cat was a recurring character in a series you could buy the new installment of each summer.

The novel’s final part, “Like Beauty,” spins ahead to the end of this century, when the now familiar characters escape New York for Denver. The trio drives across the desolate, toxic Midwest in a Winnebago outfitted with tank treads, off to see a mysterious scientific wizard who is planning a space journey in a three-legged flying saucer. Yet for all the enthralling sci-fi suspense in the novel’s last 100 pages, Cunningham shows, through a deeply moving ending I won’t reveal, that he is most interested in how we love and care for one another. The literary references in this section are especially plentiful (and fun to spot), starting of course with Whitman at his most cosmic, and including, to name a few, “The Wizard of Oz,” Jules Verne and “Escape to Witch Mountain.” That’s not to say that “Specimen Days” is derivative of any of these. In fact, it’s the literary cousin to two recent novels that convincingly span the past, present and future with profound moral seriousness: Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin” and David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas.” (Full disclosure: I’m Mitchell’s American editor.)

And that’s what it all leads to: A moral outlook that sees the patterns in the chaos, the connections among the disconnected. A novel’s disparate parts have to add up in a way that is both surprising and inevitable. What determines the success of this is, I believe, the author’s moral vision. Cunningham cares most passionately (and most knowingly) about the largest and most hopeful human experiences: compassion, community, art, connection -- the infinite manifestations of love. It is his unique moral vision that successfully hinges three distinct narrative panels into a triptych of unified beauty. It’s what raises his individual stories out of their genres into the glorious realm of art.

“Specimen Days” does not gleam with the same precision and polish as does “The Hours,” but to assume it would do so would be unfair. Cunningham’s themes and ambitions are too exhilarating for neat containment. He’s worried about the future of man in the universe -- an understandably messy concern that can lead to an occasional narrative stumble. Too often he relies on Whitman to underscore his ideas when in fact his complex, affecting characters -- whether human, ghost, alien or machine -- do the job with full conviction. The first section is too long and the last not long enough. The science part of his science fiction -- the lizardy aliens, the hoverpods, the surveillance drones that buzz around like pool balls with wings -- is mostly familiar stuff. But when you close the book you won’t be thinking about these minor flaws. Instead you’ll be pondering Cunningham’s big, haunting, beautiful vision of who we were, are and one day might be. *