Walt Whitman, the great 19th-century American poet, is at the center of Michael Cunningham's most recent novel, "Specimen Days" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005). In his last novel, "The Hours," it was writer Virginia Woolf. The novel lets the reader speculate what the "granddaddy of American poetry" would think about today's America. "Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you," wrote Whitman in "Leaves of Grass." This line is repeatedly quoted in Cunningham's novel.

This is not a novel in the usual sense of the word, but rather three linked novellas in one volume. Names, characters and motifs recur throughout the book's three parts, which are set in past, present and future America.

Each part represents a different literary genre: The first, "In the Machine," is a ghost story set in Manhattan of the Industrial Revolution. The story centers around Luke, a physically deformed boy of 12 born to a family of poor Irish immigrants. He is in love with Catherine, the fiancee of his brother Simon, who was killed in a work accident - swallowed by the machine he operated at a metal factory. Luke speaks the language of Whitman, quoting him endlessly, and even meets him in the street. He is convinced his brother's soul is inside the machine that swallowed him.

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The second part of the novel, "The Children's Crusade," is a thriller. Set in today's Manhattan, its protagonist is Cat, an African-American forensic psychologist. She distances herself from her handsome white boyfriend Simon, and gradually gets closer to Luke, an activist in an international terrorist network. The members of the network, all of whom are children, embrace people in the street, quote lines from Whitman's poems and then blow themselves up.

The third part of the novel, "Like Beauty," is a science fiction story that takes place in a futuristic Manhattan. Simon the android, Catherine the reptilian alien and Luke the boy-prophet escape from New York and set out for a new life in post-apocalyptic America.

Joy and devastation

A depressing mood envelops the novel, which depicts the social and cultural decline of America. "Look around," a character on the verge of insanity - who calls herself Walt Whitman - says to the forensic psychologist. "Do you see happiness? Do you see joy? Americans have never been this prosperous, people have never been this safe. They've never lived so long, in such good health, ever, in the whole of history. To someone 100 years ago, as recently as that, this world would seem like heaven itself. We can fly. Our teeth don't rot. Our children aren't a little feverish one moment and dead the next. There's no dung in the milk. The church can't roast us alive over minor differences of opinion. The elders can't stone us to death because we might have committed adultery. Our crops never fail. We can eat raw fish in the middle of the desert, if we want to.

"And look at us. We're so obese we need bigger cemetery plots. Our 10-year-olds are doing heroin, or they're murdering 8-year-olds, or both. We're getting divorced faster than we're getting married. Everything we eat has to be sealed because if it wasn't, somebody would put poison in it, and if they couldn't get poison, they'd put pins in it. A tenth of us are in jail, and we can't build the new ones fast enough. We're bombing other countries simply because they make us nervous, and most of us not only couldn't find those countries on a map, we couldn't tell you which continent they're on. Traces of the fire retardant we put in upholstery and carpeting are starting to turn up in women's breast milk. Would you say this is working out? Does this seem to you like a story that wants to continue?"

Cunningham, interviewed by phone while riding Manhattan's subway, could not have found more accurate words to describe the disappointment with today's America. "It's difficult right now to deal with America's future," he says. "We find ourselves - at least until the next elections - with a government that irresponsibly bombs other countries, that actually destroyed Iraq, that is in the process of destroying the American environment, that makes sure most of the wealth is out of the hands of 90 percent of the world's people, that hurts our civil rights - it's hard to feel optimistic about the future in a country like this," says Cunningham.

Why did you choose to put Walt Whitman at the center of the story?

"He is the greatest American poet. He beautifully praised the America of 1850 and saw an imaginable future. This was a time when it seemed possible that America could become the most generous, democratic nation on earth. I think it turned out very differently. I wanted the voice of the great visionary poet who looked at America's future and saw nothing but good."

No one is immune

Cunningham, 54, was born in Los Angeles and has been in New York for more than 20 years, where he lives with his partner Ken Corbett. As a young man in the 1970s, he wanted to be a painter, but in the end registered to study literature at Stanford University and began to write short stories.

His first three books, "Golden States," "A Home at the End of the World" and "Flesh and Blood," did not garner much attention. He burst into the public consciousness with his fourth book, "The Hours," which won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN-Faulkner Prize in 1998. It was later adapted into a film starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore.

His latest work, "Specimen Days," is a conceptual novel. This is the source of both its weakness and its strength - the book is very unusual and thought-provoking. It was published in the United States in 2005. The Hebrew translation, by Carmit Guy, was published by Keter Books under the title "Assabei Pera" - wild weeds - with an afterward by Oded Peled.

"Specimen Days" seems to be almost a direct literary response to September 11 and Islamic terror. Cunningham says that the 21st century proves every day anew that no one is immune. Ironically, it makes no difference whether you are rich or poor, he says. He says his book would have looked completely different had it been written before September 11 - mainly because September 11 demolished Americans' feeling of immunity. Unlike other countries, America enjoyed this feeling for many years, but then woke up one normal morning to find thousands killed in a terror attack.

The second part of the novel depicts what seems to be the fulfillment of an American fantasy - the heroine disarms a terrorist child through warmth and love. Cunningham admits he doesn't think it is all that easy to love and disarm a child in this way, but wishes it were, and explains that this is why the story ends ambiguously.

Cunningham says that in the first part of the novel, the young man devoured by the machine he operates to support his family is a metaphor for the industrialized, commercialized world in which we live. This story was set during the Industrial Revolution because that period produced tremendous change, he explains. He is not against technology, however - after all, he notes, he is speaking from his mobile phone while riding a train.

The third part of the novel is a science fiction story. The genres of fantasy and science fiction have flourished in the West in recent years. How do you explain this?

"In the world we live in, technology is moving forward. If we live long enough, quite likely we are going to be confronting machines that can think by themselves and will know human beings that made contact with alien civilizations - how could you not write about it? I think science fiction is a more accurate reflection of the world in which we live."

In spite of all the progress and technology, he says he does not think the basic nature of human beings has changed. This is part of what is so interesting nowadays: We are apparently the same creatures we were 2,000 years ago, but now our world has changed, he says.

The genre game

The tripartite plot of "Specimen Days" is like that in "The Hours": One part is about the life of Virginia Woolf, the second about a depressed housewife who reads "Mrs. Dalloway," and the third about the life of Clarissa Vaughn, a contemporary New York book editor who is reminiscent of Mrs. Dalloway.

Why did you choose to split the plot of the book?

"I feel we live in such a vast world," he says. "It's certainly the biggest it has ever been, there are more people in it than ever before, we have much more access to information about life all over the earth than anyone had before, and as a novelist I find that one story just doesn't feel like enough anymore. A hundred stories feel like enough, but three are certainly more than one ... it's my part to address the vast complexity of our lives and how much we know about the world."

Why did you decide on three different genres in a single novel?

"I have always loved ghost stories, thrillers, science fiction. They are often not taken seriously enough and they're often approached as entertainment, whereas they are dealing with such profound and important subjects as the spirits of the departed, the evil in the word, what's going to happen in the future, love affairs, tales of abusive parents. I just wanted to see what I could do with these genres that I love so much. Because I'm probably too ambitious, I tried to connect them to each other."

Would you define your writing as post-modern?

"Most novels are post-modern. We're in a post-modern period, although I'm not sure any of us fully understand what post-modern actually means. It's innovative the way I tell three separate stories ... but each of the three is quite traditional. I never wanted to produce ironic or post-modern commentary on literary modes; I wanted to embrace them. I guess it's a sort of post-modern version of extremely old-fashioned traditional forms."

Currently, Cunningham is rather busy. He is writing a screenplay based on the life of Queen frontman Freddy Mercury, and is also working on a musical with David Bowie.

Apart from that, he already has an idea for a new book - but, he notes with regret, he won't be able to start working on it before the winter.