Day by Michael Cunningham review — a bad case of the ‘wafts’
Nothing gets Michael Cunningham going quite like the dissatisfied middle classes. The characters in his novels are often middle-aged, comfortable New Yorkers who are haunted by a kind of restlessness. A struggling artist who can’t yet relinquish their youthful dreams. Or a middle-aged mother who is suddenly overcome by despair. Or a man who harbours a secret attraction to his sibling’s partner, or perhaps his partner’s sibling.
Inspired by his great literary heroine, Virginia Woolf — who appears as a character in his most famous novel, The Hours (1999) — Cunningham likes to peer into his characters’ consciousnesses, disentangling what he calls their “inner tumble of thwarted desires”. His books often unfold over tightly constrained time periods, as emphasised by their titles. The first 50
