Woolf in Lizard's Clothing?

By Lev Grossman

The great thing about being an obscure novelist is that it doesn't matter what you write. "I could do pretty much whatever I wanted," Michael Cunningham remembers fondly, "because nobody was likely to pay attention." That was before Cunningham wrote The Hours, his moving reimagination of the novel Mrs. Dalloway and the life of its author, Virginia Woolf. The book won a Pulitzer. Nicole Kidman got an Oscar for the movie. Just like that, Cunningham's precious obscurity was gone. "It's harder to feel the necessary degree of recklessness when people are paying attention," he says. "You have to be willing to fail."

If his new book is any indication, Cunningham, 52, is still willing to fail, and in the best possible way. Specimen Days (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 308 pages) is divided into three parts, all set in New York City but each in a different era: the Industrial Revolution, the present day and--stay with me here--the far future. The three parts are written in three different literary genres and feature the same three characters. Walt Whitman also makes a cameo. Oh, and there's a 5-ft.-tall, talking alien lizard woman. Recklessness: check.

Cunningham wants to be clear up front about the whole Whitman thing. "That came in later," he says, over a double cappuccino at a Greenwich Village cafe. "I suspect it will look to some people like [I thought], 'Virginia Woolf was a gold mine. I might as well try to cash in on Whitman as well.'" The poet appears in person only in the book's first part, a grim, oddly lyrical look at the lives of poor factory workers trapped in the filth and squalor of 19th century Manhattan. "Who was striding through all that but Mr. Walt Whitman?" Cunningham says. "'I sing the body electric!' The great embracer of all things, at a time when there was conspicuously little to embrace."

In the second part, readers of the arch-serious Hours will be surprised to find themselves in a jittery, edgy, very contemporary mystery story about urban terrorism. And then, in another sharp turn, the third part takes us to a future Manhattan populated by lifelike androids and lizard-like aliens, refugees from another planet. (That section also features Cunningham's first-ever car chase.) What holds the disparate components of Specimen Days together is Cunningham's intense focus on New York City as a crucible in which we're forced to confront the radically foreign--even alien--realities of death, technology, urban life and each other. Whitman could embrace those realities-this is the guy who wrote, "I am large, I contain multitudes." The rest of us can only hope to eke out an uneasy daily truce with them.

And lizards came into this how? "I wrote that last section in a farmhouse in Tuscany," Cunningham says. "And every morning the loveliest little greenish-purple lizard would dart back and forth. She had exactly that aspect of intense creaturely otherness. I liked her a great deal." What does it feel like for a Pulitzer winner to put words in the mouth of a lizard? "Dizzying and odd--but that's as it should be," he says. "I just have the very vaguest stirrings of what I want to write next--and again, it's something I can't possibly do." --By Lev Grossman