This novel delves into a specific day in the life of a young NY family, April 5 of 2019, 2020, and 2021–pre, during, and post pandemic, though the words Covid and pandemic are not used. But school is online, sirens pierce the silence, flights are grounded, the definition of safe is an enigma, and 5-year-old Violet becomes unhinged any time a window is left open. 

Like other Cunningham novels, this story is entirely character driven. Isabel and Dan are drifting through their marriage raising two kids–Nathan and Violet–in a too small Brooklyn apartment. Isabel’s gay brother Robbie lives in the attic, unable to afford anything else on his school teacher salary. Dan’s brother Garth occasionally drops by, usually with baby Odin, the child to whom he is both sperm donor and friend of Odin’s mom, Chess, but not mature enough to be husband or father. 

Together, these eight people make up the world in which each of them grapples with their current situation: growing up, growing apart, living in lockdown, managing fear, dreaming of alternate lives. 

Robbie’s love rolls into and through all of them: Violet adores him, Nathan looks up to him, Isabel seems closer to him than to Dan, and Dan might love Robbie more than Isabel – though it’s not clear whether that’s platonic or something more. 

So this is a book about characters and emotions built with beautiful sentences. Cunningham has a way of capturing a scene or a moment or a feeling with the perfect image. Drifting, dissatisfied Isabel is described like this: “She loves the subway. She loves its racketing twenty-four-hour night world where other passengers serve to remind you that you are not by any means a typical member of the human species…It’s one of Isabel’s favorite parts of the day, this cacophonous, crowded nowhere, clattering between home and work but belonging to neither, a world of the in-between where, for short interludes, she’s only a citizen of the subway itself (54). 

And with Chess teaching her university classes online while baby Odin naps, the students are described as “docile, bringing to their computers a stunned quality, as if they’ve all been hit with rubber mallets right before class” (139). 

Sentences like these capture the range of emotions that plague these characters, or sometimes, the emotions that lift them up, which usually happens only when Robbie enters the room. 

I can’t say I loved this book, but I appreciate its artistry of description and its emotional depth.