This Clever Novel Stars Walt Whitman

By Lev Grossman

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM'S LAST book wasn't supposed to be the next big thing. The Hours was an audacious, challenging, bittersweet literary novel arranged as an elegant theme-and-variations on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Cunningham expected it to end up in the dustbin of quiet critical acclaim, just as his first three books had. Instead, The Hours won a Pulitzer Prize, and Nicole Kidman, playing Woolf, won an Oscar for the movie version.

Cunningham's new novel promises to do for the poet Walt Whitman what The Hours did for Woolf. Specimen Days is due out in June, and if anything, Cunningham has only got more audacious and more, well, cunning in the past six years. Like The Hours, Specimen Days is a fugue in three parts: it consists of three stories, each set in a different historical period--the Industrial Revolution, the 1920s and the far future. And each is told in a different style: ghost story, hard-boiled mystery and science fiction. You read that right. The third section will be set in New York City in the 22nd century, by which time the Big Apple will be dealing with a massive influx of refugees from another planet. What binds the three stories together is that they all, somehow, revolve around the same trio: a little boy, an old man and a young woman.

If anybody can keep all these balls in the air, it's Cunningham, and fortunately he will have some help. The ringmaster of this cosmic, triply three-ringed circus is Whitman himself (Specimen Days & Collect was the title Whitman gave to a collection of his journal entries). Tom Cruise, call your agent. --By Lev Grossman