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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The latest novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Michael Cunningham takes place on April 5th, 2019, April 5th, 2020, and April 5th, 2021. Fittingly, the novel is titled Day. The story centers around a family living together in a Brooklyn brownstone. There's Isabel, a photo editor who's feeling bored, and her marriage to Dan, a musician turned stay-at-home dad who wants to get back into songwriting, but Dan and Isabel seem to have an easier time talking to Isabel's brother Robbie than they do to each other.

Robbie lives in the apartment upstairs, and is still recovering from a bad breakup. He's a sixth-grade history teacher whose work includes reading some preteen, hot takes in Columbus. As an escape from his current life, Robbie creates a fake online persona named Wolfe, who has a decent Instagram following. Robbie/Wolfe posts new photos to Instagram multiple times a day. Wolfe is a doctor, which Robbie could have been if he'd said yes to one of the many medical school acceptances.

Also in the house are Dan and Isabel's two kids, Nathan, an angsty tween, and Violet, a perceptive and slightly anxious little kid. The family dynamic, already complicated, and 2019 starts to unravel, and 2020, and then 2021, the family struggles to deal with loss and put themselves back together and the aftermath of their year of staying at home. The novel Day comes out tomorrow, and you can catch Michael Cunningham at the McNally Jackson at the Seaport tomorrow at 7:00 PM, or on Wednesday morning at Three Lives & Company at 10:00 AM.

We are thrilled to be joined by Michael Cunningham. So nice to see you.

Michael Cunningham: Likewise. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: It takes place in the course of one day over three years. How was that time restraint helpful in telling this story, the story you wanted it to tell?

Michael Cunningham: The trick about this story was my feeling that I couldn't imagine writing a contemporary novel that did not mention the pandemic. It would be like writing a novel set in London during World War II without mentioning the Blitz. At the same time, how do you keep it from being a pandemic novel, if you will, for a sudden unexpected new genre? Novels are about human beings. I came up with this structure for telling the story. The three days are, as you said, divided into three parts morning, afternoon, and evening.

Morning is before the pandemic, afternoon is at the height of the pandemic, and then evening is what I'll call the post-pandemic, with all respect to people who are still suffering from it.

Alison Stewart: How did you decide on the day of April 5th?

Michael Cunningham: Part of writing a novel is inspiration, instinct, and careful planning, and part of it is just a little bit arbitrary. Also, some of it is frankly a question of narrative nuts and bolts. I needed it to happen when the pandemic was still a little bit new. You could say at its height, when we were hoping we wouldn't get COVID from opening a letter or maybe we hadn't washed that banana with enough Clorox, so there was a period. Then, I don't know, April 5th, I talked to somebody last night in Austin, Texas who had actually researched April 5th, "What historical events occurred on April 5th to which I might be referring?" I had to, "Oh, no, I just--" I like the number five.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Enough for a person. This is Michael Cunningham, we're talking about his novel, Day. Whose voice came to you first of all the characters?

Michael Cunningham: Yes, that's a good question. This one bounces around. It's in the third person, but we're in different characters' heads. Actually, because it is roughly equally about a certain number of people, the three-- I guess you could say central characters, I don't know, I think of everybody as the central character, it arrived as a trio.

Alison Stewart: That makes sense.

Michael Cunningham: They arrived in my sense of their relationship to each other.

Alison Stewart: The couple and the brother.

Michael Cunningham: Yes. The couple, the marriage, the straight married couple, and the gay brother. Of course, they are first and foremost individuals, but for this book, they arrived in terms of their complicated relationships to each other.

Alison Stewart: They seem like a unit, and that's part of the issue. It's part of the joy of the family relationship, but it's also part of the issue that they're a unit.

Michael Cunningham: There is so many joys having issue. It's somewhere within their chats, yes. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Robbie seems to have decided-- Mommy's going to move out. We learned this early on, I'm not giving anything away. His sister actually asked for him to move out. In your thinking about this, is this a matter of space or is there something else at play? Does she know she needs to break up this unit?

Michael Cunningham: You know, it's both. As is so often the case, there is a reason, often, a perfectly good reason, but then there's something else underneath the reason. This being a novel set in contemporary New York, it is, on one hand, about real estate, about the fact [chuckles] that no one, hardly anyone can afford to live anywhere, but yes, yes, yes. There are always early drafts that no one sees, and I brought that more to the surface in an earlier draft, the sense that Isabel realizes it's just time. It's just time for her to let go of her brother as some sort of perfect meets.

They don't have sex. I hope that's not a spoiler alert, they don't have sex. That is part of why she feels so guilty about it. Robbie understands, but she feels terrible because she knows that there's that behind her eviction of him as well as just, "Oh, honey, we need the space."

Alison Stewart: The book is very New York, there's some very New York moments. I'd love for you to read a section, "Isabel is crying on the subway." She's not that happy in her marriage. She is in an industry where she's dealing with a boss who remembers when they had giant expense accounts. [chuckles] Fly people around and film and shoot things, and she's a photo editor and she's like, "It's just not like that anymore." We pick up Isabel here. This is Michael Cunningham reading from his novel, Day.

Michael Cunningham: Okay, thank you. "A woman weeping on the subway is always a stranger to others and more likely than not, to herself. Isabel seen those women. She's wondered how they let things get that far. She loves the subway. She loves its racketing 24-hour night world. The other passengers who serve to remind you that you are not, by any means, a typical member of the human species, not when squeezed in among suited commuters, or a tattooed boy with a Yorkshire Terrier peeking out of his backpack, an orthodox woman flanked by twin sons in payot, and a man wearing a bowtie, reading The Golden Bowl with ostentatious dignity, like the shade of a professor doomed to ride the 4 train reading late James, until God decrees that he's finally arrived at a stop.

It's one of Isabel's favorite parts of the day, this cacophonous crowded nowhere, clattering between home and work but belonging to neither, a world of the in-between, where for short interludes, she's only a citizen of the subway itself. She can tell she started weeping when the man standing beside her shifts himself as far away as the crowd will permit. She hadn't realized, she's as discreet as she's able to be. She gropes in her bag for the mini pack of Kleenex, can't find it.

She can feel the man, steel gray crewcut, shaving cut on his chin, straining away from her as to others, an Indian man wearing a bright blue suit, the boy with the Yorkie, whether out of respect for Isabel's distress or nervousness about her sanity or both. Isabel's done it, most people have. You do your best to avoid being noticed by the delusional who may very well be waiting to aim a rant as the first person who makes eye contact.

She knows too that neither her impeccable makeup nor her handbag, she lied to Dan about what it cost, men had no idea how much a bag could matter, categorically disqualifies her from the ranks of the potentially threatening. She's not sure why this is happening. It has to do with drift, the sense that the gravitational pull isn't holding as it once did, which has to do with Robbie moving out and with Dan's determination to resuscitate a career that never quite existed, which everyone knows but Dan.

It has to do with her ever less successful attempts to impersonate a mother. Violet knows she's faking. How is it that only the five-year-old can see it? Yet, she's loved and looked after. Her husband gets up early to make breakfast for the kids. She wanted this. She wanted the marriage. She wanted the kids. She wanted a place in Brooklyn, refused to worry over much about the mortgage payments. She wanted the job too, and she was good at it. She strove. She outperformed others.

The trick now, it seems, is to keep wanting it, the job as well as the marriage, motherhood, the stratospherically costly handbag. The trick is learning not to despise herself for her claustrophobia and disappointment. It's unprofound. It's white lady problems.

Alison Stewart: That was Michael Cunningham reading from his new novel, Day. Why is she so not wanting what she has?

Michael Cunningham: Whoops. Changing glasses, I don't like using glasses. I think she has-- I know because I wrote this, it's one of those privileged, no denying it, but settled, predictable lives that seemed like a good idea. That seemed-

Alison Stewart: On paper, right?

Michael Cunningham: -yes. Let's marry a rising young rockstar. Let's get an apartment in Brooklyn. Let's have kids. For some people like Isabel, then you're there and you are on one hand lucky to be there. You feel embarrassed about being unhappy with a life that a huge percentage of the population would kill for, but you feel stuck and stymied and you just want something else. You hate yourself for wanting something else and the next thing, you're crying on a subway.

Alison Stewart: I think Violet, the child, her child, might be my favorite character.

Michael Cunningham: Oh, great.

Alison Stewart: I love Violet. I also, and I don't want to give anything away, is Violet in touch with the not real in this world? Because all during the pandemic, Violet is saying, "Close the windows. Close the windows." The parents think it's because she's frightened to let the virus in. I start to think it's because there're spirits she doesn't want to have come in.

Michael Cunningham: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Does Violet have some magic to her?

Michael Cunningham: Violet does have some magic to her. Violet also believes she has magic to her, which I think is sometimes hard to separate from having actual magic. Oh, this might be a bit of a spoiler, but anyway, Violet suffers an illness from which she recovers. On the other side of the illness, she has powers that I leave room for anyone to believe that they're just in her-- She can't bend forks or anything, but she certainly sees that which is invisible to other people.

Is that just in her mind or is it real? Frankly, just between you and me, I think it's real. I wanted to leave room for the skeptics. I embrace skeptics.

Alison Stewart: I'm going for the real as well. My guest is Michael Cunningham, the name of the novel is Day. It is out tomorrow. Michael will be speaking at McNally Jackson at the Seaport at 7:00 PM, and then at Three Lives & Company in signing books Wednesday at 10:00 AM.

There is a character in the novel who is an English professor at Columbia who has to make adjustments to teaching students on Zoom from their bedrooms, and you yourself, you're a lecturer?

Michael Cunningham: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Did you have to do that as well?

Michael Cunningham: I did.

Alison Stewart: Oh boy.

Michael Cunningham: Yes. I don't think one single person who teaches anybody from first graders to graduate students was happy about doing it on Zoom. It was, if anything, a real demonstration of how much of teaching and learning has to do with physical proximity. Once you're deprived of them, you realize that there is some sort of actual exchange of molecules.

Now, I'm going to start sounding like Violet, but there is some kind of invisible, almost bodily transfer, and you don't appreciate how strong that is until you find yourself a little face on a computer screen, feeling like a mediocre TV show that the kids have been forced to watch.

Alison Stewart: You thank one of your teachers in your acknowledgments, your first-grade teacher, actually. What do you remember about her? Why did you want to acknowledge her?

Michael Cunningham: Ms. Janssen-- I probably went overboard with the acknowledgments. I don't know why. I guess because we who have survived have survived a terrible, terrible time so far. Something about that made me want to think almost everybody. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Michael Cunningham: Starting with Ms. Janssen, who was a great teacher, we were all terrified of her because she felt it was hugely important that we learned to read and we learned to read well, and I'm six. I think that got me started with some love of reading and language. She gave me books that were not part of the first-grade curriculum. I think if you're very lucky, somebody like that gets to you really early.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Michael Cunningham, the name of the book is Day. Before the pandemic, we get a sense of who everybody is and what they're dreaming about, what dreams have been met, which ones they're still longing for. Then once they're in the pandemic, some people try to make some of their dreams come true. Dan starts to write music again, gets a little online following. Robbie is in Iceland, and they have this person, Wolfe, this Instagram persona that they have created, and they keep going with it.

Michael Cunningham: They do.

Alison Stewart: Why do they keep going with Wolfe? Robbie and his sister, Robbie does most of the work.

Michael Cunningham: Robbie does most of the work, but they collaborate. Wolfe is-- I love Instagram. I love the idea that suddenly, there is this visceral sense of the vastness of the population. I'm okay with pet pictures, I'm okay with pictures of pies up to a point. I'm very much aware of how easy it would be to construct a person who has an Instagram account, but is not an actual person. I don't know if people actually do it, but what Robbie is-

Alison Stewart: Sure they do.

Michael Cunningham: -I'm sure they do. What Robbie is doing is not so much creating in this imaginary person named Wolfe, a sort of superhero, superstar, any of the wish fulfillment options that he might have taken. Wolfe is essentially Robbie's idea of a slightly better version of Robbie himself. He's more charismatic. He went to medical school as opposed to Robbie who decided not to. That's really interesting to me, and the whole notion of having an avatar.

It would be one thing to have it as an avatar, a 10-foot-tall blue person who can fly, but the idea of this sort of twin who is essentially you, but with lights turned on a little higher and the volume turned up a notch or two, and certainly at the beginning, that's who this imaginary person is.

Alison Stewart: In the laster of the book on the 21st, we see the aftermath of the pandemic, and I won't give anything away, but I did find it interesting that in The New York Times, you said you were about 70 pages into the novel, and you thought about scrapping it.

Michael Cunningham: Oh, I did scrap it.

Alison Stewart: You did scrap it.

Michael Cunningham: I did scrap. Well, scrap, we'll see. Maybe I will get back to it. I was well into a very different novel when the pandemic struck. Like I was saying earlier, it seemed impossible to write a novel that took place as if there was no pandemic, and at the same time, there was no way to work it into this novel without making it look that novel, without making it look like exactly what it would be. "Oh, he had to put the pandemic in." [laughter]

Alison Stewart: The name of the novel is Day. It is out tomorrow. Michael Cunningham will be at McNally Jackson at the Seaport at 7:00 PM tomorrow, at Three Lives & Company, and signing books Wednesday at 10:00 AM. He was gracious enough to come to the studio today. Michael, it's so nice to meet you.

Michael Cunningham: It's great to meet you, too. Thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way right after the news.

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