The Hours : A Novel
by Michael Cunningham
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael CunninghamEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Published)
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 1998-11-11
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 230
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of The Hours : A Novel
Book Review: All in a Day
Summary: 5 Stars
I am the last person I know to have read THE HOURS. I admit I delayed for mostly wrong reasons, put off by the success of the popular movie, and then by hearing that is was a reworking of one of my favorite books, MRS. DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf. I still haven't seen the movie, but within the first few chapters of the book, I realized that this was far from being a mere spin-off. Michael Cunningham seems virtually to channel Virginia Woolf, not only capturing her style and sensibility, but revisiting her deepest concerns to show their relevance to the setting and mores of our own day.
I cannot imagine how it would be to come to THE HOURS without having read MRS. DALLOWAY first. The distinctive structure of that book -- an hour-by-hour account of a single day in the life of a woman as she prepares to give a party in the evening -- is copied in each of the three interleaved stories that make up Cunningham's novel: Virginia Woolf herself, living near London in 1923, beginning work on MRS. DALLOWAY; Laura Brown, a young wife and mother in 1949 Los Angeles, preparing for her husband's birthday dinner, reading the Woolf novel, and beginning to question her life; and Clarissa Vaughan, in New York City at the end of the century, preparing for a party in honor of an old friend who once nicknamed her "Mrs. Dalloway." The three stories move forward together, hour by hour, paralleling the progress of the book, and linked to one another by a series of references (such as the yellow roses that crop up in all three stories) that give a little lift of recognition each time they occur. But there is nothing systematic about this; the action seems natural, not preordained. When Virginia thinks about the novel, for example, she at first plans something rather different from the book she finally wrote; we see her ideas for the book changing over the course of the day, in response to her emotional reactions to its small events. So when even the model is fluid, the stories that are patterned after it can be fluid too.
And then there is the style. When writing about Virginia or Laura, Cunningham uses a straightforward modern style, but he writes of Clarissa uncannily like Woolf might have done, had she been living in New York in the nineteen-nineties. For example, as she sets out: "The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Clarissa pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths." A little overwrought, perhaps? But read on: "New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this." That is New York all right, not a translated Bloomsbury. It is quite amazing how beautifully Cunningham balances the reflective mental imagery that is the hallmark of Woolf's style with a practical sense of urban life as it is lived today, with its share of street people, oddballs, AIDS, and four-letter words.
Yet structure and style alone do not make a novel; Cunningham uses his three stories (which ultimately interconnect, though in a slightly artificial way) to develop themes that are also central in Woolf's own work. Most obviously, there is the role of women. All three, at some point in the day, question what they are doing, and attempt small escapes that may be harbingers of something larger. This is clearest in the story of Laura Brown, who apparently lives the American dream, so her growing unease raises questions by coming from left field. Virginia's end by suicide is prefigured in a prologue, and Clarissa, by contrast, seems already to have made her break for independence, living openly as a lesbian and having a child by a donor. Woolf touched lightly on gay themes in MRS. DALLOWAY and elsewhere, but Cunningham develops these a lot more explicitly, enabling him to examine many more shades of the sexual spectrum than his model, but always honestly and often with a touch to stop the heart.
But the quality that Cunningham captures best, I think, is the very essence of MRS. DALLOWAY: the sense of looking back at the past from middle age. The third Clarissa chapter (pages 89-98 in the paperback) is a perfect distillation of the bittersweet scent of past loss intruding on present contentment. Perhaps if I put together a few sentences from the end of that chapter, I can have Michael Cunningham say it better than I can: "She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as pleasant and dangerous as literature itself. Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. Venture too far for love, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port. Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that." And then the very last lines of the chapter: "There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: that was the moment, right then. There has been no other." But Clarissa, nonetheless, is content.
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