The Dog Days of Covid

On Michael Cunningham’s ‘Day’

Remedios Varo, Star Maker, 1958, Oil on board

There’s a handful of things that absolutely everybody has an opinion on, and few are more contentious than what does or doesn’t screw up children. Just when it seemed no topic could escape our ever-widening social divides, school closures during the Covid pandemic made many of us — from dues-paying party members to the politically nomadic — come together in wondering if there were downsides to isolating children from each other.

That moment of parental ecumenism lasted about five minutes, of course, before various concerns were seen as politically “coded.” Worrying about school closures made you a hardcore libertarian willing to sacrifice children to Covid and anxieties about schools opening implied you couldn’t wait to lace up your jackboots and start trampling on the freedom of children. It was imagined that a person’s positions on these questions necessarily correlated with the party they voted for or their preferred source of media.

However, the front lines of these battles weren’t the pundit pulpits of news channels. The rubber of ideology hit the road of reality in the homes of ordinary families. Parents raising children during lockdowns were less concerned with politics than with trying to ensure their kids turned out as functioning members of society or, at the very least, not sociopaths.

The adults in Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, Day, are no different. There are three adults in one home here: spouses Isabel and Dan, and Isabel’s brother, Robbie. Between the three of them, they attempt to raise Violet and Nathan, ages 5 and 10, respectively. Despite facing eviction from the crowded home, Uncle Robbie is loved by the rest of the family perhaps more than they love each other. This is their familial set-up as they enter, pass through, and mostly survive the Covid pandemic.

Robbie must move out so Nathan can have his own bedroom, to avoid the sexual confusion that might occur if the pubescent boy continues sharing a room with his sister who recently asked “what Nathan’s penis is for.” The grown-ups are preoccupied with not doing or saying anything that will pervert the children’s development. They suffer, in Robbie’s words, the “ongoing doubt about whether (when) one of them will make the crucial mistake, the one the children will carry with them” into their adult lives. Notice the definite article: the mistake — as inevitable as in Philip Larkin’s poetic recognition that “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”

All of this is in Part One of Day, which sets each of its sections on April 5th — first in 2019, then 2020, and finally 2021. The pre-pandemic section is the novel’s strongest. Cunningham is at his best when shuffling combinations of his characters, showing their multitudinous nature bloom with each new conversation or argument. The dialogue between siblings is expertly rendered — anfractuous and sometimes confusing, yet always following the sinuous path of a conversation that runs through a shared lifetime. Each shift is motivated by ancient subtext, adult conversations determined by disputes and in-jokes forged in childhood.

There’s some graceful prose here, including the opening that delicately paints dawn over the East River, evoking George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (more on this later). But there are some duff moments where determining the point of view requires a confused untangling of clauses. Here’s an egregious one: “Nathan has, for as long as Robbie can remember, felt like an outsider . . . .” Whose interiority are we in? It seems, confusingly, like Robbie’s from within Nathan’s perspective. The sentence, written with greater clarity, might be: “Nathan has, for as long as Robbie can remember, seemed like an outsider.” The difference between seemed and felt is the difference between comprehension and frustrated rereading.

Part Two uses the Covid pandemic to separate characters, and here the threads of the novel fray as they unwind from each other. As each character finds a bubble of life to occupy, Cunningham delivers a variety of wonderfully executed miscommunications: emails written but unread, words thought but not spoken. In various ways, he shows that there’s nothing social about distancing. However, Cunningham is writing against his greatest strength: characters interacting. The few scenes where people finally speak with each other underscore what is lacking in the other scenes. The dialogue far outshines the inner monologues.

It also becomes clear that the stakes in Day are remarkably low, rarely more than the “oops” with which Robbie absentmindedly reveals a con he’s engaged in. The family is essentially living with prolonged ennui, and the conflicts they face — divorce, career change, moving house — threaten them with only a bit more ennui. Like the adults towards the children in Day, Cunningham takes a paternal stance towards his characters, loathe to let anything damage them too much. The worst thing that happens here occurs offscreen.

In an interview, Cunningham asked how anyone could write a contemporary novel without addressing the pandemic. Well, perhaps that’s so, but who said his novel needed to be contemporary? He might have done better to push the setting back a decade and continue with the non-Covid novel he’d started before the virus swept the world. In that same interview, the journalist writes: “About 13 years ago, when discussing in an interview how [the AIDS crisis] impacted his creative life, he [Cunningham] said when you survive something like a war or an epidemic, your sense of life and of the world is altered irrevocably. All you have seen — the death and the dying — becomes part of the material you have been given, and you try to negotiate it as a writer.”

Cunningham has undoubtedly done something important with this idea in the final section of Day, but in a manner that didn’t necessitate the Covid pandemic for material. In fact, that crisis might be too large for such a slim book to handle and examine with any dexterity or real clarity. At times in the novel, the pandemic feels like an overlay — a translucent layer that sits atop the novel Cunningham meant to write. The “death and the dying” are distant here and often totally absent except for a single crucial tragedy that could have come about without Covid.

The pandemic is never wound into the fabric of the story in the way that its forebears and influences are. Just as Woolf haunts Cunningham’s The Hours, Eliot can be glimpsed between the lines of Day — and she is sometimes explicitly rendered in the text. Midway through the book, Robbie closes a letter to Isabel with a line from The Mill on the Floss, which could act as a kind of Rosetta Stone to the novel’s primary theme: “They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.”

Introducing the pandemic to the story inevitably raises the question of whether our characters will survive the virus, which undercuts the more compelling question posed by Robbie: “Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods?” Day suggests it might not be the job of parents to prevent their kids from suffering, but to cushion them from the fallout of inevitable tragedy. It’s only a shame that the novel waits until its final pages to give any of them something more to survive than marital stultification and career boredom.

Matthew Morgan lives in the UK. He is building a life out of books on his Substack, Volumes.