New Fiction
Atlantic, The, June, 2005 by Joseph O'Neill
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Like its predecessor, the Pulitzer Prize—winning The Hours , Michael Cunningham's fifth novel consists of three stories set in three different epochs. Also like The Hours , which reworked Virginia Woolf, this narrative triplex is built on a bookish foundation: the poetry and ontology of Walt Whitman.
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The poet appears in person in the first story, a supernatural tale about a malformed, Whitman-reciting thirteen-year-old and his family, whose members are all horribly transmogrified, physically and spiritually, by the grotesque nature of factory work. The second is a detective story of post-9/11 New York, in which a woman police officer hunts down children who have smoked too much Leaves of Grass , as it were, and turned into suicide bombers. The third, set in a "postmeltdown" America of the future, tells of a humanoid's escape, in the company of an extraterrestrial, from sinister "Old New York"—a humanoid who, for thematic reasons, ...
