I have a problem with Michael Cunningham and that problem is that he hasn’t rewritten “A Home at the End of the World” every time he’s written a new book. I did love “Flesh and Blood” and “The Hours” but I REALLY loved “Home”, it’s one of my favourite books ever. I read those three so long ago they’re not reviewed on this blog, by the way! I haven’t absolutely loved his more recent ones but reading a review by Simon Stuck-in-a-Book of this one (here) convinced me that this one was going to reel me in. And I’m pleased to say it did! I have amazingly now read and reviewed three of the five books I bought in January this year.

Michael Cunningham – “Day”

(28 January 2024, The Heath Bookshop)

Robbie hopes he’s not doing harm, not only by pilfering the posted photos of strangers (he’s amazed that he hasn’t gotten caught yet) but by rearranging them into someone who doesn’t exist. Or, rather, who exists as a garnering of other people’s specifics (p. 21)

She isn’t sure when she ceased to be the central figure in her own story and became, instead, the greedy and embittered sister, her own shadowy twin, the one who’d been given everything and yet keeps on grumbling, Not enough. (p. 57)

He’s not quite sure when he edged over from acting like an affable, harmless man and became an affable, harmless man. It seems to have occured by imperceptible degrees. (p. 98)

The central structure of this fine novel is that it’s set in the morning, afternoon and evening of the the same day over three years, and when I mention that those years are 2019, 2020 and 2021, you can see where this is going. Yes, it’s a Covid novel, as well as being a family novel and a New York novel, and it’s had enough time to be a clear and adequate reflection on the Covid times and their varied effects on people.

We meet Dan and Isabel, a rather Iris Murdochian and Anne Tylerish couple in a way, the faded ex-not-quite rock star, his cherubic good looks coarsening as he ages and thickens, the frustrated mother / career woman, their marriage slowly drifting as their children come into their own personalities. Both are a little too close to Robbie, Isabel’s brother, who currently lives in the annexe upstairs but is about to be evicted by Isabel; he’s given up one job to do another less lucrative one and has just ended another love affair. Added to the mix are Dan’s younger brother Garth and the mother of his child but not his partner, Chess, and the three children, pre-teen Nathan, younger Violet and baby Odin, and Robbie and Isabel’s elderly father. Oh, and Wolfe, Robbie’s adult invisible friend who he’s created as an Instagram feed.

By 2020 they are all stuck in various ways, Nathan in pre-pubescence as his two friends grow up, Violet in fear of the virus, Isabel and Dan in their marriage, trapped in the flat, Robbie in Iceland in lockdown. And in 2021 they have all fractured again, almost unbearably movingly. It’s a quiet book about, well, what’s it about? How family is and isn’t, the ties between blood but not parental relatives, different ways of bearing being a mother, how we remember people?

Little links between the chapters show Cunningham’s intelligence as well as his warmth; people seeing themselves and others in mirrors, water (another Murdochian feature), owls. I gobbled this up, mainly in a long reading session in the garden (see photo) but this will bear another, slower reading, too.