The patience of Michael Cunningham aficionados will be largely rewarded by One day in April. Almost ten years since the author of Hoursa masterful book loaded with prizes, including the prestigious Pulitzer in 1999, had offered nothing to literature. In his eighth novel, the septuagenarian writer continues his moving New York chronicles with the refinement and delicacy that made him famous.
It’s the story of a family on the rocks. Dan and Isabel, a couple on the decline, are the parents of Nathan and Violet. Dan is a former rocker. Isabel is an artistic director in a magazine. Robbie, Isabel’s brother, a college professor who dreams of medicine, lives in their attic. Dan’s brother Garth is an emerging visual artist. With Chess, his ex-girlfriend, who teaches literature at the university, they are the parents of Odin. The action is mainly set in Brooklyn, but also in Iceland and in a forest north of New York.
In search of happiness
In a tripartite form which is reminiscent of that of Hoursthe author gives us news of the gang before, during and after the pandemic. Thus, the first chapter takes place on the morning of April 5, 2019, the second, the afternoon of April 5, 2020, and the third, the evening of April 5, 2021. Let’s be clear, this is not a umpteenth confinement story. Cunningham uses the illness, which is never named, to address the way in which it has disrupted our relationship with time and death. In the characters’ quest for happiness, there is a before and an after, a radical awareness that takes place.
At the heart of the book is the trio of Dan, Isabel and Robbie, a love triangle in the broadest sense of the term, a configuration in which a higher form of love circulates. “But no one, until this morning, had yet said the word amousy. Robbie just has to hope that Isabel really means it when she says Dan and I are in love with you — the “me” is important — we also hope that she knows that he too is in love withboth of themand that he has no designs on Dan in the traditional sense of the expression. »
The novel depicts a society obsessed with success, and even more so with the image of this success. Thus, Robbie created a character on Instagram, Wolfe, who is a projection, a dreamed double, an improved version of himself. “His followers like that he is a pediatrician, in his final year of residency, working in a community health center. […] They like the implication, never clearly expressed, that he’s had a few friends with whom things didn’t work out and that he’s now waiting to fall in love, in no particular hurry. »
Cunningham revisits the themes and motifs that are dear to him. In addition to the love triangle, we find the magic of fairy tales, where nature and animals occupy a mysterious, almost spiritual place, but above all the finesse of the family portrait. Depicted in its smallest nuances, a complex assembly of fraternities and filiations, doubts and convictions, mourning and disillusionment, this community is poignantly human. There are not many twists and turns, of course, but there is so much precision in the prose, so much accuracy in the evocation of what is stirring deep within beings.
Nothing escapes the author: the life that passes, the traces it leaves, the dreams it nourishes, the pacts it breaks, the beings it unites and those it separates. “A life awaits her,” writes the narrator, speaking of Isabel. She will not continue to live unhindered. Some of the damage cannot be repaired, but it will continue its life. She will perhaps be happy from time to time, and perhaps more lastingly than that. It seems possible to him. »
