Michael Cunningham's time has come

CAMBRIDGE -- Novelist Michael Cunningham has a lean and feline look, as though at any moment he might dash up a tree and look down from an unseen perch. In jeans, white T-shirt, and spiky blond hair, he sits at a table outside the Charles Hotel, puffing brown Sherman's MCD cigarettes and talking about his new book, ''Specimen Days."

Cunningham, 52, has been riding a high wave since his 1998 novel, ''The Hours," won the Pulitzer Prize and its 2002 movie version, with Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore, drew a passel of Academy Award nominations and won for Kidman the Oscar for best actress. He's completed or committed to writing several screenplays, including one of Susan Minot's novel ''Evening," another for Julia Roberts from the Lolly Winston novel ''Good Grief," and another about the Freddie Mercury story for Robert De Niro's Tribeca Films. Meanwhile, ''Specimen Days" has been optioned by Scott Rudin, who co-produced ''The Hours."

But amid all the glittery movie activity and hobnobbing (the phrase ''Julia and I" was heard), Cunningham has produced in ''Specimen Days" a dark and strange book about death, terrorism in a city, and a dystopian future, haunted by the poetry of Walt Whitman. Published before the July horrors in London and amid ongoing jitters in New York, its middle section plumbs the minds of suicide bombers in a city, immature boys driven by a vision greater than themselves.

To be topical was the farthest thing from Cunningham's mind. ''I wanted to do something with genre fiction," he said, ''which I have always loved and not only read exclusively as a geeky 12-year-old but have continued to read as a geeky adult. I've always had an interest in ghost stories, thrillers, and science fiction" -- the fiction modes, respectively, of the three segments of ''Specimen Days." ''I've always felt these lurid, highly plotted tales are the adult versions of the fairy tales we read as children."

Part one, ''In the Machine," involves a grisly industrial accident in New York in the 1860s, with a ghostly presence and a boy compulsively spouting Whitman's poetry, as if it were sacred scripture. In ''The Children's Crusade," set in the present, a New York policewoman tries to solve a series of terror bombings by boys motivated by a twisted, quasi-religious vision of Whitman's worldview. Part three, ''Like Beauty," takes place in the distant future, inhabited by lizardlike aliens, Orwellian political forces, and a wisecracking android programmed to quote -- against his will -- the poetry of Whitman.

Cunningham never thought, of course, that one month to the day after his book was published, real-world London would be struck by young male bombers, apparently driven by perverted ideas of sacred scriptures.

''I think of the people who commit these acts as children," Cunningham said of the London bombers. ''They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty."

Twisting beauty
Whitman himself makes a cameo in the first story, but of course not in the others. With a few exceptions, fragments of his verses pop out of characters' mouths with no clear connection to the immediate action. It's as if the poet's electric visionary declamations -- ''I am large. I contain multitudes" -- are hidden in plain sight in the world of these stories, trying to take over the universe. But without the poetry's context, they are more creepy than warm and fuzzy. They could mean nothing, or be misunderstood in murderous ways.

''Whitman deplores nothing -- that's the whole point of him," Cunningham said. ''He embraces everything. A great artist is a kind of prophet, and the teachings of a prophet can be used in any number of ways. Art should be encouraged and never censored. But it's part of my respect and love for it to believe that it can be misused. Hitler loved Wagner and probably had him playing in his twisted evil brain as he committed acts we shudder to contemplate. Art is more potent than a little pool of beauty into which we can dip periodically when the world is too much for us. The splitting of the atom is also an essentially neutral act -- but look where it leads."

''Specimen Days" represents a shift in tone from Cunningham's previous books, even though ''The Hours" is also haunted by a famous literary figure, Virginia Woolf, and has a complex structure with different time settings. His first two novels, ''A Home at the End of the World" and ''Flesh and Blood," explore unlikely alliances and relationships in the modern world, without the undercurrent of menace.

Writing itself was an unexpected career for Cunningham. Raised in Southern California, except for a four-year period when his family lived in Germany (he speaks German), he started out majoring in art at Stanford. ''Art history and studio art," he said. ''I wanted to be a painter. But about midway through I began to think I probably wasn't really a painter." Then he took a creative-writing course, ''and didn't feel especially good at it, but did feel a kind of bottomless interest in the process, which has never ceased."

He switched his major to literature, then got a master's degree at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lived in different places and published short stories in various magazines. Eventually he moved to New York, where he now lives with his partner, psychologist Ken Corbett, in Greenwich Village. ''A Home at the End of the World" was published in 1990 and ''Flesh and Blood" five years later. Neither was a big seller, though ''Home" was well reviewed.

However, ''The Hours" drew raves in 1998, notably from Michael Wood in The New York Times, which gave it a huge boost. It narrowly lost out to Alice Munro's ''The Love of a Good Woman" for the 1998 National Book Critics Award but then won the Pulitzer and was optioned by Rudin, who co-produced the remake of ''The Manchurian Candidate" and ''Angela's Ashes." After the movie, book sales went over the million mark.

Smooth adaptation
After the Hollywood success of ''The Hours," ''A Home at the End of the World" was released last year, starring Sissy Spacek and Colin Farrell. Cunningham wrote the screenplay, ''under duress," he said, otherwise the film wouldn't have been made. It was not widely distributed, and its box-office take was miniscule. ''Flesh and Blood" is being made into a miniseries for Showtime.

Some writers hate the process of having their work turned into film, but not Cunningham. ''I'm not one of those writers who feels that every word of the book is precious," he said.

''The whole point of agreeing to have it continue in some other medium is to see what other people will do with it. My one stipulation before I agreed to 'The Hours' being made into a movie was that I wanted to know who would do the screenplay. I didn't want to hand it over to a writer I'd never heard of. When Scott Rudin said, 'How about David Hare?' " -- the prominent English playwright -- ''I said, 'Great, that works for me.' "

He intended not to meddle, and yet, he said, ''I was very much involved and they were great about including me. David Hare felt much more reverential toward the book than I did. Our only disagreements were about things he felt should be in the movie and I felt should be let go."

Exciting and glittery as the movie part of his life is, Cunningham is clear that his real calling is still to be a novelist. When his current screenplay commitments are fulfilled, he will return to his writing room to start a new book. ''I have a crude nascent sense of what I want to do next," he said, but the only thing he's sure of is that there will not be a literary figure at the center.

In fiction, his biggest challenge is success itself. He says he has huge respect for J.K. Rowling's ability to keep plowing ahead on the Harry Potter series, despite the pressures of fantastic fame and wealth. On a smaller scale, to keep one's head engaged and keep work coming is every successful writer's problem.

Yet the writer's lot has particular satisfactions. ''When a novel is published, however it's received," Cunningham said, ''it is the book you wrote, and a better version is not sitting on the cutting-room floor because your distributor insisted on 17 ill-advised cuts."

When you're first starting out, he said, ''you can make a big mistake and no one will care. I have found that with recognition it's difficult to retain your sense of recklessness. A certain fear of failure looms much larger now. You begin to take sums of money that the new book quite possibly will not earn back. But you have to write with those thoughts as far from your mind as possible. If the idea of honorable failure becomes unacceptable to you as a writer, you're dead."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.