The Hours
Michael Cunningham
(Reviewer - Carolyn Howard-Johnson)
1998 Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN: 0312305060
The story, in homage to Virginia Woolf, of three women connected by time & memories.
Clarissa Vaughan, one New York morning, goes about planning a party in honor of a beloved friend dying of AIDS. Laura Brown, back in the 1950s, in a Los Angeles suburb begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family & home; & Virginia Woolf, further back in 1923, recuperating with her husband in a London suburb, begins to write Mrs. Dalloway.
Guest Reviewer Carolyn Howard-Johnson writes:
The Hours is aptly named, as one would expect from a Pulitzer Prize winning author. Like an hour, it can be singularly beautiful, a momentary flash & very long indeed. Like the hours of our lives, it can feel fragmented, full, & intact -- in increments or all at once.
Michael Cunningham has written a literary novel firmly revisiting the 1920s, Virginia Woolf & her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. I thought I would remember enough about Woolf's work to do justice to The Hours. I was wrong. You, too, may want to reread the book to which The Hours pays tribute, if you are determined to get the most from it, hear the lingering whispers, find the subtle innuendoes, recognize the implications.
The story is told primarily from the viewpoint of three women whose lives we find are inexplicably intertwined. A reader must be prepared that Michael Cunningham--who has paid his dues--randomly breaks the rules that we, as new millennium readers, have come to expect. Most of us are not accustomed to a story told in first person, present tense. Many of us have not read a work that uses streams of consciousness since we read Faulkner in college. Michael Cunningham jumps--effectively but unfamiliarly--from point of view to point of view.
Perhaps it is time that those of us who have gotten rusty extend ourselves a bit, both to improve our skills & our understanding. This is a story about death & resurrection. It seems an affirmation of lives that we may find trifling, insignificant. Somehow, gently--very gently--Cunningham makes us see that existence is, after all, promising. Even if you plan to wait for the movie, you may wish you had “read the book first” & Mrs. Dalloway before that.
Associate Reviewer Carolyn Howard-Johnson is the award-winning author of
This Is The Place, & her book of creative nonfiction, The Harkening: A Collection Of Stories Remembered, has won three awards.
She has signed a contract with Star Publish for the upcoming release of her new how-to book The Frugal Book Promoter: How To Do What Your Publisher Won't. www.starpublish.com.
She writes about Utah's culture, tolerance & other subjects. Her fiction, nonfiction & poems have appeared in national magazines, anthologies & review journals. She has appeared on TV & radio stations nationwide.
Carolyn Howard-Johnson is an instructor for UCLA's Writers' Program. She loves to travel & has studied writing at Cambridge University, United Kingdom; Herzen University, St. Petersburg, Russia, & Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, as well as UCLA & the University of Southern California.
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