The Hours : A Novel by Michael Cunningham Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Hours : A Novel
Book Review: A day in the life times three
Summary: 4 Stars
"Here, then, is the world (house, sky, a first tentative star)..." These words are not the words of Virginia Woolf, although readers could certainly be forgiven for thinking so, they so accurately catch her idiosyncratic cadence and her offhand thrilling shimmer; they are the words of an invented Woolf in The Hours--"The Hours" was Woolf's working title for Mrs. Dalloway--a novel in which the American writer Michael Cunningham imagines several episodes in Woolf's life over the course of a single day in 1923 (the year she was writing Mrs. Dalloway). He then sets these episodes against a single day in the life of a young married woman and her little boy in California in 1949 and, in alternating chapters, against a day in the life of a middle-aged New York editor and her (gay) circle of friends at the end of the twentieth century.
He also invents the afternoon of Woolf's suicide: "She hurries from the house wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun." But even on the way to her own drowning, the writer in Virginia (and the writer was all of her) is distracted by "a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulphur..."
How accurate Cunningham's evocation of her subsequent drowning is we can never know, but it feels inspired and terrible, and there is even, at the heart of it, the kind of mad glee of a children's book: "She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind..."
A mother and her little boy, walking across a nearby bridge, just narrowly miss catching sight of her. They foreshadow another mother and little boy living in Los Angeles in 1949. Laura Brown (the other mother) is longing to stay in bed so she can finish reading Mrs. Dalloway--she reaches for it automatically "as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation"--but she forces herself to get up and have breakfast with her husband (who, when he takes a bath, boyishly floats in the tub, his "sex shrunk to a stub") along with their son Richie who makes her think "of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess."
Laura Brown later escapes to a hotel room for an illicit afternoon with her book, an escape that parallels Virginia's earlier attempt to escape suburban Richmond for the psychic dangers of London. But then there are so many parallels: Richie will grow up to be called Richard (the first name of Mr. Dalloway) and before he comes to accept the fact that he's gay he'll have an affair with a girl named Clarissa Vaughan (but the fact that her first name is Clarissa will lead Richard to call her Mrs. Dalloway) and Vanessa Bell will come to tea with Virginia, and Vanessa's children will find a dead bird in the Woolf garden and circle it with roses so that Virginia, looking down at its "modest circlet of thorns and flowers" will think, "It could be a kind of hat. It could be the missing link between millinery and death." Years later, back in New York City, Clarissa (the other Clarissa), on her way to buy flowers for a party for Richard--he's dying and is about to receive a major literary prize--will spot a famous face peeking out of a movie trailer and wonder if it belongs to Vanessa Redgrave (not only another Vanessa, but also the actress who played Clarissa in the movie version of Mrs. Dalloway).
There are non-Woolfian allusions as well: Clarissa Vaughan leaves a copy of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook on her nightstand, and at Laura Brown's hotel the desk clerk gives her the key to Room 19 ("To Room 19" being the title of one of Lessing's most anthologized stories) and the writer in The Golden Notebook is another sort of Woolf (Anna Wulf) and later still, Clarissa Vaughan concludes that Lessing has long been overshadowed by other writers. All of this might sound just too postmodernly coy for words, but in fact Cunningham is playing--just as Woolf did--not only with time and ideas about time, but also with ideas about how much we are not only part of one another but also ghosts of one another. He also quotes the part of Mrs. Dalloway in which Clarissa sees herself as part, "she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself."
Even the typography of The Hours supports these death-in-life and life-beyond-death intensities via the ghostly aura given to the chapter headings, making use of the pale-grey names of the characters whose chapter it isn't to flank the name (in bold type) of the character whose chapter it is. But is this evocative and tender novel derivative? Only in the sense that it couldn't have been written if Mrs. Dalloway hadn't been written first; except for a very brief flat patch in the middle and a ho-hum ending, it's too inspired to ride on Woolf's coat tails. Its buoyant precision also catches Woolf's clarity and comedy, along with her clear-eyed ability to be critical of herself and her work. It's also an extremely intelligent novel that ends up feeling like an extended riff by a gifted jazz musician on the work of a genius of a classical composer: with its complex arrangements of literary reverberations and its memorable descriptions of regret and civilised squalor, with a woman's straw sandals making a "small, crisp sound when she walks" and "decapitated flowers floating in bowls of water", it has its own marvels.
And yet the movie made from this often fascinating book was pretty awful, in spite of the brilliant casting of Nicole Kidman to play Woolf (she was a revelation). Most of the other actors were extraordinary too. So was it the script? The direction? That turned it into a period piece that was also a soap opera? I can't remember it well enough at this point to hazard a guess.
Book Review: Good Movie, Better Book
Summary: 5 Stars
After seeing the movie nearly two years ago, I read the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Hours. I was intrigued with the story and eagerly anticipated certain scenes before starting the book. Even with the prior knowledge of the plot, I was not disappointed in the least. Michael Cunningham's sentences flow with ease, gracefully taking the reader through three stories. The set up of the story is simple: a day in the life of three women in three different locations and time periods. No one story or woman is more significant than the others; each is intertwined and dependant to the others.
As an avid fan of Virginia Woolf's work, including Mrs. Dalloway, I have come to love the stream of conscious writing style. Cunningham pays homage to Woolf, her distinct writing style, and, of course, to her seminal work Mrs. Dalloway. Cunningham takes Woolf's style and reinvents it to a modern day version. Unlike the modernist writers that started anew and broke from tradition like Woolf did, Cunningham reuses the famous story of Mrs. Dalloway and Woolf's brilliant writing style in a different and, in some respects, more profound way. I think Cunningham achieved this through the seemingly trivial details and other lesser known characters.
One particular that brought the story together is Lara Brown's son, Richard. Through Richard, Cunningham takes on the contentious Oedipus Complex and unearths the roots of older Richard's psychological instability. Richard's indefatigable desire to be loved by his mom is incredibly poignant and tragic. While I badly want Lara to love Richard back like the way he loves her, I understand Lara's inner dilemma and empathize with her. It's almost magic the way Cunningham makes it easy to sympathize with Lara, a monster of a mother. I know many other writers have accomplished this feat, but it's still amazing to me. Richard is seen as the aftermath, the destruction that is caused by a mother that thinks independently and, at times, selfishly. This is not to say that Cunningham advocates for the antithesis: a mother that avoids her inner voices for independence and freedom. His frequent reference to Woolf's opening line, 'Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself', makes that evident; it is a declaration for the rights of women in some sense. Nonetheless, Cunningham presents both sides without taking a stance on either one, leaving it up to the readers to make their own conclusion.
Overall, I'd highly recommend this book even if you've seen the movie. And if you have read The Hours, read Mrs. Dalloway and watch the movie!
Book Review: The tedious hours
Summary: 1 Stars
I was unable to get past page 49 of this incredibly tedious novel. It must be what optimistic publishers call a "literary" novel, if one defines "literary" as "unreadable".
Nothing really happens after the opening, which is a vignette of Virginia Woolfe's suicide. (I have little idea of who she was other than that she was popular with my mother's generation, but even then, I recall no book of Woolfe's in my mother's extensive collection of books from that long ago period.)
The writer merely wiffles on and on .. .. and on, describing people's ordinary lives in three different times and spaces. Hell, if that's all there is to writing a book, I could have written a hundred myself by now, instead of the handful I actually have written. Let's see:
Page 37:
Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her.
(Isn't this a perfect example of the horrible lack of proper grammar that your Junior High English teacher would have criticised? Note that the second sentence isn't a proper sentence, it is a disaster.)
The doors would have to be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmeyer's men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning -- fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
I find myself irritated not only by the crummy sentences but also by the odd, non-standard, punctuation. the hyphen above has no spaces in the book, not even "hair spaces" between "morning" and "fresh", as if to make one compound word, 'morning-fresh'. In other words it is presented as a dash except with the length of a hyphen.
This is the kind of "writing" that pretty much anyone could do. E.G:
Sandra goes into the kitchen. That pan, she thinks, that saucepan sitting over there, on the stove. Its Teflon surface reminds her of Richard's conscience as he sits in the office rejecting manuscripts.
- and so on, and on, and boringly, on.
This book, an advance reading copy that has somehow come into my hands, is going into the garbage.
Book Review: Does very little for me
Summary: 2 Stars
I never felt like I got anywhere with this book. Yes, I saw how the women's lives merged, but that does not a story make. I think that is my problem. I expect a story. Books like this one and Catcher in the Rye are not focused on the story as much as the feelings and emotions of the characters. They try to give the reader a sense of what it is like to be depressed or to hold back rage and strong emotional feelings. I respect that but have not gained from it. I don't read books to be pulled down by depression and angry emotions. I read to be entertained, and that requires a story.Book Review: I could not put the book down.....
Summary: 5 Stars
I read this book in a few hours. I could not put it down -- I felt like Laura Brown - needing to do what is my societal duty, but completely obsessed with Cunningham's book.
To fully appreciate this novel, a person should have read Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway" or at least have a knowledge of that particular book.
Cunningham weaves a seamless story. It is actually refreshing to have one chapter melt into another chapter of another woman in a different era....yet all are bound by duty versus their own desires.
No wonder this unique and beautifully written novel won the Pulitzer Prize.
I do not feel it is a book just for women, nor is it an "estrogen fest" as some narrow minded misogynists have deemed the novel.
Read the novel for what it is and don't permit gender to get in the way of a well written, lavish, and extraordinary book.
Just because the book is primarily about females and deals with homosexuality, suicide, and depression does not mean it is not great literature.