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The only problem with Michael Cunningham’s prose is that it ruins you for mere mortals�� work. He is the most elegant writer in America.

Admittedly, elegance doesn’t carry much cachet these days when Important Novels are supposed to make strident social arguments that we already agree with. But in the presence of truly beautiful writing, a kind of magic vibrates off the page.

That’s the aura of Cunningham’s pensive new novel, “Day.�� He has developed a style calibrated to capture moments of ineffable longing. The opening scene, sunrise in New York, dawns like a poem about the city on the threshold of life. This is storytelling for TV only if you mean Tableau Vivant.

A confirmed trinitarian, at least in the literary sense, Cunningham has returned again to the triptych structure he explored in “Specimen Days�� and “The Hours,�� which won a Pulitzer Prize. The three sections of “Day�� take place during three consecutive years �� 2019, 2020 and 2021 �� always on April 5.

From that time period, you may already have surmised that “Day�� is another variant on the covid narrative, which at this point feels as fresh as a tattered N95 mask in the glove compartment. But the virus, which Cunningham never explicitly mentions, is not the subject of “Day��; it’s the setting, an implacable condition that enforces containment and stasis on people desperate to. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post: