Day by Michael Cunningham review – living through the pandemic

The author of The Hours explores the inner lives of a Brooklyn family, before, during and after lockdown

The day of the title is a composite of three days: a morning in 2019, a locked-down afternoon in 2020, and an evening in 2021, when it is possible to travel and gather again. On 5 April in each of these years, Michael Cunningham takes his samplings, or specimen hours, minutely observing the lives of the people he finds in a Brooklyn apartment. A& quarter century after The Hours, with its three Mrs Dalloways in different times and cities, Cunningham returns to a solidly tripartite structure across which contrasts and connections build. And he returns, with undiminished faith, to the project that united modernists as different as his heroes Joyce and Woolf: the effort to articulate the vast inner lives of a few unexceptional people on a single day.

Before, during, after: that’s the basic movement, though “before” is suffused by a sense of lateness as a couple drift in their marriage, trying to recapture youth. Dan and Isabel, reaching middle age, have changed to accommodate each other, changed with parenthood, and they’re not the couple who fell in love. Isabel is yearning to get out long before the virus shuts her in. Scanning departure boards, “thinking of the women who abandon everything”, she is kin with Laura Brown, the quietly desperate woman in The Hours who cannot go on making perfect birthday cakes. For the moment, Isabel sits on the stairs, “paralysed by her own triviality”, and imagines never moving; future residents of the apartment will have to edge past the blockage.