So I bought it for the cover…

All you really need to know about the plot of Michael Cunningham’s Day is that it is set on three separate days (one pre-COVID, one in the middle of a lockdown, and one post-COVID), and that it focuses on a family – Dan and Isabel, and their young children Nathan and Violet. There’s also Isabel’s brother, Robbie, who lives in the attic of Dan and Isabel’s Brooklyn brownstone.

There are a number of things that drive the plot (including Robbie’s trip to Iceland, an alter-ego Instagram account, and relationships with extended family), but essentially Day is a character study.

There were elements of this story that I think Cunningham overplayed – the description of the Instagram account was initially clunky, and the multiple references to Dan, Isabel and Robbie being ‘in love’ with each other were strange and not at all convincing –

Robbie’s in love with Isabel and Dan, too. Or rather, he’s in love with the restively joined singular creature they’ve become: Isabel’s briskly knowing melancholia conjoined with Dan’s unembarrassed optimism; her inner tumble of thwarted desires and his earnest if unreasonable expectations. Robbie’s in love with the person they’ve created together – someone romantic, someone generous of heart, someone kind and gentle but wised-up and ironic, as well.

Weird.

But I overlooked the flaws because I was seduced by Cunningham’s writing. It was the small details about each character that spoke volumes.

A woman weeping on the subway is always a stranger. To others and, more likely than not, to herself. Isabel has seen those women. She’s wondered how they’ve let things get that far. […] The trick now, it seems, is to keep wanting it, the job as well as the marriage, motherhood, the stratospherically costly handbag. The trick is learning not to despise herself for her claustrophobia and disappointment. It’s unprofound. It’s white lady problems.

Dan’s mother inspired in him a hunger for criticism. It’s the only reaction he can trust.

And elegant descriptions. Of Iceland, he writes –

…covered everywhere in grass, a seamless carpet that runs uninterrupted to the tops of the escarpments and into their vales and crevasses, as if some god of the North had waved a titanic hand and simply said Green.

There was also humour; deep, bone-weary sadness; and a gentle exploration of vulnerabilities, limitations and people’s capacity to love.

Violet must have overheard something. Try keeping secrets from children, whose very lives depend on listening, and knowing.

A mother is not innocent. She can’t be. Too much is asked of her.

Dan can’t say when, exactly, he realised he’d expected Isabel to be grateful. He’d rather not know about the extent of his own vanity, the hubris that led him to marry a woman he thought would be glad about his eagerness to marry her at all, he who was a fledgling rock star, who’d been asked more than once to autograph a fan’s bare breast. He who defiantly married a remarkable if outwardly unspectacular woman.

This novel is far from perfect – I suspect that if I had dwelled on the characters too long, they’d be whiny, or if I’d dissected sentences, they wouldn’t have seem so pretty… Anyway, I didn’t do either of these things, instead, I devoured Day.

4/5

On thinking about an aunt’s religious beliefs, Robbie says –

The crucifix fascinated me when I was a kid, this tiny wooden man mostly naked with his arms spread, up there on Aunt Zara’s wall. Aunt Zara’s Christ was one of the hunky ones with abs and shoulders as opposed to the gaunt skeletal ones. Zara was the most Catholic person in our family but she liked her Salems and her vodka stingers along with her hot muscular Christ and she believed in expensive shoes.

As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (June 22): Belfast 9°-19° and Melbourne 7°-13°.