Finally, after 30 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham is returning to Colorado. He takes the stage for the Denver Newspaper Agency’s Pen & Podium series at the University of Denver’s Newman Center on Monday night, and, he said, he is eager to return.
Speaking by phone from his home in New York, Cunningham said he came to Colorado soon after finishing college.
“I was 22 years old, maybe 23. I was living in San Francisco with a couple of friends from college and got fed up with the city. I was just beginning to try to write, and I just couldn’t bear San Francisco one more second. I told myself, in the way of a 22-year-old, ‘What I need is a place that is beautiful and quiet and where I don’t know anybody.’ So I just picked Colorado, almost arbitrarily. I took my $300 out of the bank and got in my old wreck of a car and drove to Boulder.”
After starting out in Lyons, Cunningham moved to a place on Pearl Street, in Boulder, and worked at “probably a long-defunct bar called the Walrus.” (It’s still there.) After about a year, he drifted to another place.
Cunningham’s latest work, “Specimen Days” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), collects three novellas, each placed in New York.
“In the Machine,” a ghost story, is set in the 19th century. “The Children’s Crusade” is a post-9/11 detective story, and “Like Beauty” takes its inspiration from science fiction and imagines a Manhattan of the future.
With “Specimen Days” in general, and “The Children’s Crusade” in particular, Cunningham joins a growing group of writers whose work reflects the personal and societal impacts of 9/11. He said it was unusual to already see so much writing influenced by the attack, because “it usually takes writers about a decade to start writing” about an event of that magnitude, but that the disaster seems to have mobilized novelists as never before.
He was, he said, “roughly equally shocked by 9/11 and by the government’s response after 9/11. The fact that our government chose not to use it as a reason to empathize with other countries who had had similar experiences, sometimes over the course of centuries, and to accept the sympathy of other countries, but rather to engage in a highly debatable war against people who were not in any way directly responsible for 9/11.”
The course of events, he said, made him rethink the notion that politics had no real place in the novel. “I can’t help but notice that in the countries with really problematic governments, like many South American (countries), writers all write political novels. I probably speak for more writers than just myself when I say there is a growing sense for many of us that the apolitical novel is a luxury only extended to others who don’t live in countries that are holding some of their citizens indefinitely without bail or hope of trial or charges, that isn’t suddenly rolling back our civil rights in the name of the security.”
“Specimen Days” is certainly more overtly political than “The Hours” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), but that novel was not without controversy. Patricia Cohen wrote in a New York Times story in 2003 that many Virginia Woolf enthusiasts “argue that the book and movie play into long-held, insidious views of Woolf that they have spent their professional lives repudiating. For years the standard take on Woolf was as the invalid lady of Bloomsbury, a frail, snobbish madwoman. It was not until the 1970s and ’80s that feminist scholars finally rescued her from being a pinched neurotic.”
Cunningham said that, if anything, he was surprised that there wasn’t more criticism about his portrait of the writer.
“I know there were people who took exception, and probably sometimes violent exception, to the way I wrote about her. That’s just how it is, particularly with a writer like Virginia Woolf. People, especially feminists and feminist scholars, identify so fiercely with her that no portrait of her is going to seem right. We all have our particular Virginia Woolf.”
But, he said, “Virginia Woolf is hugely important to me. Virginia Woolf actually changed my life. I wanted to write about her, even if people took mild exception to it. She was the first great writer I ever read, and she was revelatory to me.”
A fellow student handed him a copy of “Mrs. Dalloway,” “and it was magic. I had never seen sentences like that. I had never seen the world described in that way. It made me begin to be a serious reader, and ultimately be a writer.”
When Cunningham speaks in Denver, he will probably talk about genre fiction. “I feel like it is time to rethink the categories. The way it’s organized now, there is essentially ‘serious fiction’ in one section and then ‘unserious fiction’ – like detective stories and science fiction and romance – in another section.
“It’s important not to over-romanticize the notion of the craft, but the good ones (genre fiction) are not only very, very good, they are much more experimental and profound and beautiful than a lot of the … thinly veiled autobiographies that are over in the serious section,” he said.
Michael Cunningham’s lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. on Monday. Information on the event can be found at penandpodium.com, and tickets can be purchased through TicketMaster.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
“Specimen Days”
By Michael Cunningham
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pages, $25
