While technically Day by Michael Cunningham will fall into the category of COVID pandemic fiction, this one was beautifully and uniquely constructed—three days in three years, stretching from 2019 to 2021. The same day on the calendar, so each is a year apart.

In 2019, Isabel and Dan, a married couple live in a brownstone with Isabel’s brother, Robbie, living upstairs. Robbie is getting over his last boyfriend by living a fictional life online and dabbling in an all-to-real flirtation with Dan. Isabel and Dan’s children – Nathan and Violet – are somewhat aware that their world is slightly off-kilter. In 2020 as the world shuts down, Robbie escapes to Iceland and leaves Isabel to answer the questions of her marriage and her children alone. A year later, Isabel journeys to find her brother, hoping to find answers that will let all of them move forward.

While slim (fewer than 300 pages), Cunningham packs in a lot to be contemplated. The structure allows the pandemic to frame the story without weighing it down.

Verdict: Fully Recommend

Slice of life novel written so beautifully! Day follows one day, April 5, over a few years, including 2020 during peak pandemic hysteria. Day follows a family and an assortment of extended relatives. It is lyrical and so relatable, in true Michael Cunningham fashion.

Thank you to NetGalley for this early read. I was very excited to read Cunningham's latest novel and it did not disappoint. If you've read The Hours, or any of his other novels, then you know the journey you are in for and in the case of Day, the descriptions alone and the voice of the entire book is worth the read. Following multiple years in the lives of a family struggling with age, relationships, co-habitation, illness, and more, Cunningham does an amazing job of sharing characters who are human and experiences that we can relate. Worthy of adding to the shelf collection as well!

I love Michael Cunningham, especially his earliest... Flesh & Blood, A Home at the End of the World and The Hours meant so much to me when I was in high school. But this one is not for me. I tried, on multiple occasions, to get into it, and it just didn't grab me. I think the spectre of a covid narrative also didn't help--I have no interest in that. Wasn't it Norman Mailer who said you need to be 10 years out from a war before you write about it?

I enjoyed the short chapter structure of this novel and found many of the character’s reflections poignant and meaningful. However, the prose felt meandering at times and as a result I thought the plot was bogged down by long internal monologues that kept taking me out of the story. This did have some gems and I found the ending to be emotional, particularly from the lens of the 2020 pandemic, but I still was left wanting more.

Thank you to NetGalley for the free ARC in exchange for a review!

“Day” takes place on April 5, 2019, 2020 and 2021. I love the concept but the execution didn’t lure me in..There are moments of beautiful prose in “Day”, but it wasn’t plot driven enough and I couldn’t connect with any of the characters, particularly the adults who were self-absorbed.

Thank you to NetGalley for my review copy.

y book notes

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

My Selling Pitch:
Do you want to read an overwritten family drama centered around the pandemic but they’re just privileged white people?

This book genuinely and with its whole chest has female characters talk about how they’re not like other girls.

Pre-reading:
Legit know nothing about this book, but sometimes I get sent real books instead of trendy fantasy YA lol.

Thick of it:
Variegated

Wow, a hot doctor? Absolutely yes. (He is not for you. He is not for anyone. He is not real.)

Jerry-built

Incursions

Fuck, I love Fleabag.

Verisimilitude

Sisal

Oh ew, you’re putting a five-year-old on a diet.

Cordovan

I disagree with that. I don’t think moneyed unhappiness even comes close to the poor’s struggles.

Burghers

Insouciance

Scabrous

Parsimony

Creosote

Donna Clarke like Halt and Catch Fire? No. Can’t be. But dear god, I love that show.

Sere

It’s giving she’s not like other girls.
She can be a hottie and have a personality. Fuck right off with that.

Dan sucks.

I’m bored.

Lambent

Imprecations

Lmao tell me a book is written by a man-
man imagines woman wants her son to be gay so she won’t have to share him with another woman. Gag.

Dude, just say you hate women. It’s shorter.

Quixotic

Women shouldn’t smile???? Dude, go fuck yourself so hard

People can wear whatever they want to.

Harridan

I think everyone in this book is fundamentally awful, and they don’t read like real women. They read like a man’s impression of women.

I don’t understand these people. I refuse to ever beg to be loved.

It just feels very overwritten and pretentious.

Dude really wants to fuck his emotionally unavailable mommy.

Brio

I think that’s an incredibly unfair and hurtful stance. How can you say that men only love women because they want them to fill a need and that they stop loving them the second a woman starts to fill it?

I reject that idea so much. Homeboy needs to rewatch the Barbie movie. Allowing the father of your child to be in that child’s life is not defaulting to some sort of marital arrangement. The world does not want women to marry men. Men use marriage to own and possess women and control them. We live in a patriarchy. Men set that up, not the world.

This sentence is so poorly constructed that it’s hard to understand. I can see two ways to read it, but I disagree with both interpretations.
It’s either saying, she changed her mind and decided that men were compelling and necessary to life AND that they’re not self-obsessed and so focused on their own feelings that the first time that they feel something, they decide it’s love.
OR
She changed her mind and decided that men were compelling and necessary to life. Men saw that confession and decided she must be in love with them then.
I think, I think the author is going for the latter. But either way, absolutely fuck off.

Male author discovers the concept of platonic love. Is that what this is? I hate this book. You can feel love for someone and not be in love with them. You can feel love for someone and not wanna fuck them.

This book was sitting at two stars but that conversation firmly pushed it into one star territory. He’s not contributing anything useful to the Covid conversation, and now he’s outright spitting on women. This book is really just white privileged people during covid complaining that their lives are hard.

That’s a bit weirdly incestuous. You made up a fictional brother and now you’re having him be your dead brother’s ideal boyfriend.

fecundity

caromed

venal

SHE’S NOT LIKE OTHER GIRLS. One fucking star. Pulitzer my ass. Get fucked.
That is literally not the narrative. All the girlies are like I am exactly like other girls. I love to be like other girls. Other girls are the best.

Post-reading:
Lmao I don’t think Pulitzer winners are for me. I felt similarly meh about Less when I read it a few years back. Like I can acknowledge that they’re well-written, but they do absolutely nothing for me, and I do not give a shit about the characters. It’s very white people problems.

And let’s not get it twisted. I love me some overdramatic, privileged bitches. I adore My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Normal People.

I think the author’s good at set dressing. The images the meat of the story generates are vivid. They’re quirky and aesthetic. There was no point to the Instagram images. I had to force myself not to skim them every time. The descriptions of those Instagram photos could have been taken out of the story and it wouldn’t have changed at all for me.

I thought all the characters were shitty people and not in an enjoyably shitty way. I particularly hated Dan. It seemed like the audience was supposed to view him as the everyman victim. What a good dad! He’s just doing his best. He’s doing the bare minimum and coke.

The whole thing just came off as pretentious and overwritten. It felt like it was trying to be artsy and musey, but it wasn’t saying anything new. It added nothing to the discourse surrounding the pandemic and its effects on people. It also doesn’t name Covid as Covid. Is that a thing? Are we doing that? This isn’t Taboo. Grow up.

It’s well written but boring, and that’s not enough for me to crucify a book, but adding in misogyny on top of that? An instant one star. This book genuinely and with its whole chest has female characters talk about how they’re not like other girls. I hated how he wrote women. I disagreed almost fundamentally with all the claims he made about love and women’s relationships.

I didn’t get the whiff of magical realism he tried to add in with the possibly schizophrenic little girl. Cancel me, but I don’t think romanticizing mental illness like that helps. And it does seem like the audience is meant to romanticize her character, but then the story goes after a five-year-old’s diet and appearance. Haven’t women suffered enough? Leave us alone.

I think this book would be interesting to dissect and pick apart. I think it’s doing a lot with very little. It’s just that everything it does is fucking boring.

If I was more of an objective rater, it should probably be two stars, but it made me mad and not in a fun way, so fuck it. It’s also got real weird, incestual undertones. It’s a short, short book and yet we talk about fucking our moms, fucking our siblings, and masturbating 10-year-olds? What’s up, buttercup?

Who should read this:
People who like to dissect lit fic

Do I want to reread this:
No

Similar books:
* Less by Andrew Sean Greer-gay novelist tries to avoid his ex-boyfriend’s wedding by traveling, character study
* Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney-shitty people being shitty, character study
* Vladimir by Julia May Jonas-college prof lusts after her coworker, character study, social commentary on academia and rape culture
* My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh-problematic Girlypop goes into a depression hole, a staple for the angry sad girlies
* Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress-pretentious art students being shitty people, character study
* The Men Can’t Be Saved-white man creates his own problems and complains about it: a novel
* Social Engagement by Avery Carpenter Forrey-depressed girl in NYC blows up her life over romantic rejection, character study
* We Are Too Many by Hannah Pittard-angry sad girl book told exclusively through dialogue

This was just okay. I’d say 3.5 stars. Got a little more interesting about 1/3 of the way through. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC

3.5-4 stars. Novel about an extended family that takes place on the same day in 3 different years, before, during, and after the Covid pandemic. It's been interesting to see how authors incorporate the pandemic into their work--or ignore it totally. Anyway, this book provides a close examination of this family and their relationships. The author is a very descriptive writer but while his prose is often beautiful, it's sometimes too ethereal and without meaning. Partly because of this and partly because of their personalities, I couldn't really connect with the characters and didn't like most of them either. I did like the structure of the book and there were some touching scenes.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for a free e-ARC of this book.

Another exquisite novel with beautiful prose that leaves you in awe of Cunningham's talents and way with words as an author.

First, thanks to Netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book for my honest review. I have to say I had a hard time getting through this book, particularly the first of the three Days--The same characters, their lives as they experience them on three days over three years. April 5, 2019, 2020, 2021. What got me past that first section was the absolutely gorgeous prose. I had a hard time relating to the three main characters at first--a brother and sister and her husband. They all seemed so pathetic and stuck. I would probably have stopped reading if the writing itself hadn't been so beautiful. The second day, a year later, did such a good job of capturing the experience of the Covid-19 Pandemic, that kept me reading through to the last day, a year later. While I can't say I loved this book, I will be looking at others by this author for that beautiful prose. Maybe his other books have more appealing characters and stories.

This book was fine. I definitely enjoyed it for the most part and would recommend it to fans of the author. The characters weren’t very likable, which is fine. But they were interesting, especially Robbie. I could have read an entire book about him alone.

A quiet and elegant book, Day visits one family on three separate days in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Although the pandemic is a central theme, the words COVID or pandemic are never actually mentioned. The author has said the he can’t imagine writing a contemporary novel without the backdrop of the pandemic and I absolutely agree.

Isabel and Dan live in a Brooklyn brownstone that is becoming too small for their growing family. Isabel feels vaguely dissatisfied with her marriage, her job and basically her life. She doesn’t know when these feelings began but she is sometimes overcome with sadness. Dan is a stay-at-home parent who at one time was a rock musician and is trying to launch somewhat of a comeback.

Isabel’s brother Robbie lives with them but they have asked him gently to search for another place to live since their oldest son needs a bedroom of his own. Robbie finds some solace in a fake Instagram account he created after a bad breakup.

All of these lives are impacted by the pandemic in ways they could not have imagined. Day is a beautiful exploration of contemporary family life that is both deeply introspective and often funny. I loved the movie 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 which was based on Cunningham’s book and I look forward to reading it now. He is a brilliant writer!

Thank you to the publisher for the review copy. All opinions are my own.

This book gives us a slice of life of three people on April 5th, 2019,2020 and 2021 as life changes from the days prior to the pandemic, through the early days of the shutdown, and again as we begin to see some relief.
The adult characters are Isabel and Dan, married with children, and Robbie, Isabel's gay brother who lives in the third floor attic room (but must leave because the children a 6 yr old girl and 10 yr old boy, need to have separate rooms.
The adults are all dissatisfied with their lives and we are privy to their introspection, internal thoughts and the failings of their dreams. I found it difficult to connect with any of these unlikable, egocentric whiney people who cared little for others. None of them showed any true affection for the others, although Isabel does recognize that her marriage is not working out well. Robbie has an on again off again relationship with the mother of his child, but little feeling for the child.
Overall, I thought that the characters and the story lacked depth, although it did somewhat reflect the time of the pandemic (the pandemic is never mentioned) , it didn't describe the utter disruption to our lives and the fears that we had during that time.
I have read several other books by this author, and liked them a lot but I thought this was far from the character driven books that he's written in the past.
I did receive an ARC from Netgalley and random House and am leaving my opinions voluntarily.

Day is beautiful and poignant, a story that deeply examines human nature and our secret longings, successes and failures as we navigate in the world. Cunningham is a brilliant writer and I greatly enjoyed this most recent of his brilliant works.

Navigating complicated relationships was difficult enough without a pandemic

How much time should pass before a contemporary calamity is approached by the literary world? The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center for example—how well-received were those novels that took something so terribly devastating, and casually set it back in front of us? I think of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, published only four years after 9/11 which seemed to illicit extreme love or loathing. More recently, Elizabeth Strout’s book, Lucy by the Sea, unapologetically tackles the pandemic head-on. But it does so from such a distance that at times it feels like she’s holding a snow-globe, trying to peer inside and understand the significance of the bits of white glitter falling upon the tiny plastic landscape.

Michael Cunningham’s latest novel Day, explores the effects of the pandemic, but never really puts it front and center, making it a character unto itself, as Strout does. Instead, he builds his tale around familiar territory—a disastrous triangular relationship (aren’t they all) and then allows the pandemic sledgehammer to bludgeon them. Cunningham’s Day is constructed by highlighting the same day, April 5, prior to the pandemic in 2019, as pandemic shut-down begins in 2020, and in 2021 as death rates climb with no end in sight. The novel is certainly reminiscent of another of his eight works—A Home at the End of the World. Three characters are fused together with all the familiar trappings. Though in Home, the power that draws them together is a shared history of trauma and loss, and the need to find a sense of place. In Day, characters come together by some of those same complex emotions and challenged relationships, but it’s the economic and geographic forces of New York that create the novel’s dynamic—at least initially. One doesn’t exist in the Big Apple without having daily life shaped around the limitations and excesses of the city. This is in part what drives “morning,” the first part of Day. The three characters—Isabel, Dan her husband, and Robbie her brother—struggle with one another trying to make sense of their existence living under the same roof. Two are at odds, two have seen their fortunes run dry, and the wrong two appear to be in love with one another. Their version of family—which includes the couple’s two children—is destined to come apart.

Robbie, the near perfect gay-uncle to his ten-year-old nephew, Nathan, and his five-year-old niece, Violet, is secretly and perhaps not so secretly in love with his brother-in-law. As the brother-care-giver-tenant in his sister’s townhouse, he becomes the third wheel in the household, and not just among the three adults. He is also a complication of space for the growing and maturing nuclear family. That appears to be the driving force for his agreed upon eviction from the couple’s upper floor third bedroom. Underlying the dynamics of course, is the unwelcomed triangular construct. Isabel flounders in her own conflict about her brother’s move, but she also struggles with her husband’s failed attempt to reignite his music career. She frequents an empty stairwell of the townhouse with her phone, fantasizing about the couple’s inevitable separation. It all feels well-planned and quite civil. But by the “afternoon” the three have fallen head-long into the grip of New York pandemic, along with nearly 9 million of their fellow residents. The manner in which things begin to disintegrate changes radically. There is no marshaling forces under the threat of a deadly disease sweeping the city. That bit of heroics shouldered in the hunkered-down beginning of the crisis, was not to be. Instead of being hermetically sealed together in their Brooklyn townhouse, the triangle is flung apart. Robbie gets stuck in a foreign country, unable to repatriate because of quarantine restrictions, and the couple absent the third, unwinds in a way that seems more certain and final. Their children serve as harbingers of events that will surface in “evening,” the third and final part of Day. There is a reckoning of the pandemic’s costs borne by the young—the paranoia, isolation, and guilt. Robbie’s absence does nothing to alleviate that.

From Isabel’s perspective, her brother has abandoned her. She oddly imagines that Robbie is now cheating on the threesome with Wolfe, a fictional-social-media-snapchat-gay cliché, fabricated by Robbie prior to the start of the pandemic. Initially, Wolfe was a game that both of them played on the social-media obsessed world, creating a near-perfect man, a man that in life seemed to have escaped each of them. In a twisted way, Isabel imagines that Wolfe and Robbie are living abroad in a cozy cabin, waiting out the pandemic. They’ve escaped the disease which is ravaging the country, and the city, but certainly has not left her own family untouched. It’s a strange jealousy over a fictitious romance that she imagines in contrast to her own failing marriage, made all the more ironic since it is Isabel who essentially threw Robbie out. In reality Robbie’s absence—and silence as the cabin sits off-the-grid on a mountainside in Iceland—begins the greatest unraveling. She feels contempt for her family including her husband and for her brother, because she is left to do everything, to muster all that is needed to ensure their survival.

It's the portrayal of Isabel and her complicated imaginings that highlight the brilliance of Day. Cunningham is as clear focused and careful in his examination of his characters’ humanity as in the Pulitzer Prize winning The Hours, and Home. What makes this novel different is the depth of understanding that he reaches when revealing the innerworkings of his characters. Sometimes with little narrative, he bares their souls in a way that is simple, smart and relatable. You wonder how many of us in the grocery store, or on the subway, have such a rich, troubled, complicated inner canvas (maybe everyone?). Isabel is unsettled, conflicted and at times, not particularly likeable. Creating believable and even admirable characters, particularly those who play center-stage, is challenging enough. In Day, she is flawed, sometimes almost unforgivably so. She does not appear heroic, nor does she exhibit any sense of remorse for her flawed nature. Cunningham’s depiction may make her hard to love, but I understand her. That bit of empathy makes Isabel appealing, and what’s more, someone we can relate to, maybe even get behind.

A recent review of Day in the Washington Post, suggested that Cunningham was the most elegant writer in America. I would not disagree with that perspective. As in his previous works, Cunningham’s prose does not fail. But why specifically is his narrative so striking? In Day, he expertly lays open his characters, as he does with Isabel. It’s as if she—as if they never had a chance. Cunningham slices through the arguments and the subterfuge. Justifying voices are stripped away until all that’s left are the subtleties of their actions and the tiny lit thoughts like fireflies heading towards the back porch light. Cunningham chooses his details carefully with just enough desperation to fill their New York lives. That honesty at times is difficult to read. I’m not sure the brain is accustomed to such things, recognizing that we are seldom this honest with ourselves, let alone find it in those around us. Another author who trades in terrifying candor is Bryan Washington (Memorial, Lot, and most recently, Family Meal), though his story-telling is even more intimate—if that’s possible—than Cunningham’s. That isn’t to say one is more or less than the other, just different. But the impact is the same—raw, a bit harsh, and with characters who have trouble finding grace to give or forgiveness to offer. It’s the kind of thing that hangs with you after you’ve put the book down. This is what makes Cunningham such a brilliant writer, and Washington as well—that ability to devise character, to envisage behavior, to choose words such that together, you almost need to look away.

The finale of Day of course, is “evening,” which takes place in 2021, two years into the three-year emergency phase of the pandemic. Evening opens with Isabel and her children living at an old country house set in the woods not far from a small lake. This is how they survive the pandemic. This is their bubble. They don’t of course survive anything, as the pandemic sweeps through the family in expected ways and some not so expected. At this point in the novel, I found myself bothered by Cunningham’s choice of dates—April 5—and the years that he chooses for the three parts of the day. By April 2021, the pandemic has swept the U.S. with rolling waves of infection and death. Vaccines have been made available, but their use is problematic and the politics around the pandemic—which Cunningham avoids altogether—continues to complicate all measure of life. I kept trying to make sense of the date. Was it random or calculated? Did I not get it or remember what happened on that day? I realized by reexamining his construct for the novel, that there really was nothing to get. And maybe that’s the point—the novel is simply entitled Day, no article to announce it, no embellishments. A random, unassuming day thrust out of three sequential but certainly consequential years. In evening, April 5, 2021 Day comes to a close. The damage is assessed, goodbyes are made, Isabel is there considering life moving forward. The ending is not unlike The Hours, where Clarissa, the central character of the novel, must assess her own life. In some ways, I wanted more, though given his catalogue of work, I shouldn’t have expected it from Cunningham. I’m that person who wants to make sense of everything—want’s the characters that I’ve come to appreciate, to believe in something—whatever it is. I’m not sure what that means for a pandemic-stained novel like this. I wanted to have learned something, now that I’m no longer masking, no longer hiding in my bubble, or hating those who snubbed all of the precautions that needed to be had. This is where the risk comes in, of drawing on something so personal and affecting as 9/11 or the pandemic. It’s hard to keep Day from representing everything that I still carry around from my personal pandemic experience.

(Note: This review is provided courtesy of the Midnight Book Club, which received a digital galley proof of this book prior to its release from Random House Publishing through NetGalley. All Midnight Book Club reviews are uncompensated and reflect honest assessments of these works.)

I’m an outlier on my rating of this book and I’m surprised. I thought at first I would love this . It took one paragraph to bring me to that street in Brooklyn just waking up to the day April 5, 2019. Cunningham immediately gives us through multiple points of view, glimpses of the main characters and their relationships with each other. It’s quiet and introspective, a character driven novel with a focus on their ordinary everyday life - usually the kind of story that I love. I liked the writing. It becomes not so ordinary, though because a pandemic is just not that. Yet, even with this intimate look, I felt distanced from them, unable to fully connect emotionally.

I liked the structure with each of the three sections starting on April 5th 2019 , pre pandemic, then April 5, 2020 during the pandemic and April 5, 2021, post pandemic. I found this to be filled with some pretty sad people with too few moments of joy in their lives . I wish I could come up with a better explanation for why this didn’t fully work for me, but it was just my inability to connect with the characters . There are many highly rated reviews and I recommend that you read those.

I received a copy of this book from Random House through NetGalley.

DAY is a pandemic novel that is an eerie reminder of what most of us lived through and how the isolation was such a mind bender. The family at the center grapples with life before, during, and after COVID-19 and we see the many ways that it affects them and what they ultimately learn about life and each other. It is a wonderfully written, thought provoking and deeply moving book that will stay with its readers long after they have turned the final page. It is one of those rare books that offers insights and reflections that will continue to reverberate for years to come. I would like to thank Netgalley for providing me with an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of this book.

This is my first book by this talented author. I enjoyed his easy writing style. I was swept away in this story and the family it was about. I loved seeing the ups and downs of this family over the years and how they handled it. Their story is very relatable. A great book indeed!

I was haunted by the writing in Michael Cunningham's new book Day. I found myself almost rushing through the book so that I could go back and reread it. The writing is stunning. Each sentence a jewel. It is difficult in this time to find a book that is not so much plot driven but language driven. The pandemic took its toll on all of us and many writers are finding ways to incorporate their experiences into their stories. Cunningham is much more subtle. The travails of the family and the ways they deal with their own lives, the intertwined lives of their family is brilliant. Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to read this book.