“Where can we live but days?” asked Philip Larkin. It’s a matter of comprehending how the relentless march of time, portioned up into circadian chunks and daily duties, can encompass all the chaos and drama of our individual and collective lives. Accordingly, the novel that takes a mere 24 hours (and sometimes less) to unfold often explodes the notion of narrative neatness by taking a deep dive into the fractured consciousnesses of its characters.
James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the 20th century’s most celebrated examples of such a novel, the richness of its evocation of a day in Dublin giving rise to last week’s Bloomsday. And this week there was “Dallowday”, on which fans of Virginia Woolf mark the mid-June setting of her 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway. At its start, Clarissa Dalloway sets out to buy flowers, accompanied by her perpetual sense “of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day”; at its close, she has returned home to host her party, and to reflect on her kinship with the young war veteran Septimus Smith as “the clock was striking”.
Little has changed; everything has changed. And we see a similar trajectory in a novel such as John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips (2000), although in less rarefied social circles; the title character is an accountant who leaves his house for the office, even though he has just become unemployed. The psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips saw in his peregrinations around London “a kind of magical realism for Little England” and a mock-heroic version of a Sartre existentialist; getting caught up in a bank robbery – just as the protagonist of another novel-in-a-day, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, finds himself in the midst of unexpected violence – is merely a reminder of his own incapacity for action.
Feelings of failure and entrapment are a recurring feature of these time-limited novels, and they often revolve around a man in crisis – see also Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (a bleakly brilliant, mescal-studded novel that ends with its central character’s death). But women, as we know, are not spared their torments either, as demonstrated by Rachel Cusk in her exploration of disaffected domesticity, Arlington Park. Sodden with rain and punctuated by dreary childcare duties and trips to the shops, Cusk’s linked vignettes of women on the edge even boast an echo of Mrs Dalloway herself in the form of desperate dinner-party host Christine.
For those who feel that a day is simply too long a time-span for a piece of fiction, there is always Nicholson Baker’s novella The Mezzanine, set during a mere lunch-hour and garlanded with footnotes upon footnotes. It’s a dazzling feat of both compression and expansion that – despite its workaday office setting and diminutive canvas – is on more than nodding terms with the modernist adventures of Woolf and Joyce. The same could not perhaps be said for the single-day novels of Dan Brown, but it can be argued that what they lack in their ability to explore the mysteries of human subjectivity they make up for in conspiracy-related hi-jinks.
