The Hours
— 1998 —
New York: Picador USA, 1998; 226 pages
* 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction *
FIRST LINES
She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she’ll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky. She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks on. The voices murmur behind her; bombers drone in the sky, though she looks for the planes and can’t see them.
PLOT SUMMARY
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham’s The Hours explores three lives ultimately entwined with the fictional Mrs. Dalloway. Brilliantly conceived and executed, the novel follows three women on a single day in three different times and settings.
One of the women is the novelist Virginia Woolf herself, who is first seen in the act of committing suicide in 1941. The story then flashes back and Woolf appears in 1923 as she begins to write the book that will become Mrs. Dalloway. Next is Clarissa Vaughan, a fiftyish book editor in 1990s Manhattan, who is preparing a party to celebrate her ex-lover, a poet dying of AIDS, who once nicknamed her Mrs. Dalloway. And the third is Laura Brown, a suburban Los Angeles housewife in 1949, who is preparing a birthday party for her husband but who really wishes only to keep reading Mrs. Dalloway.
In exquisitely written alternating chapters, each of these women moves through the hours of their days, busying themselves with seemingly ordinary details—buying flowers, making cakes, having tea with a sister. But all the while, they contemplate the meaning of their families, loves, and lives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
Born on November 6, 1952, in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised in Pasadena, California, Cunningham is a novelist, screenwriter, and short story author. He studied literature at Stanford University and was a Michener Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received his MFA. While a student, he wrote short stories that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and Paris Review. His story “White Angel” appeared in the New Yorker and was chosen for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories, 1989. It later became a chapter in his 1990 novel A Home at the End of the World, a novel about three people—a gay man, his bisexual friend, and a straight woman—who form a family together.
Among numerous awards, Cunningham received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993. His novel Flesh and Blood (1995), a multigenerational saga of a Greek family, was followed by The Hours, which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize as well as a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2002, The Hours was filmed with the central roles played by Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf.
Cunningham’s later novels are Specimen Days (2005), By Nightfall (2010), and The Snow Queen (2014), along with a collection of short fiction, A Wild Swan and Other Tales (2015).
Besides the novels and short stories, Cunningham has written a nonfiction book, Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown (2002), and two screenplays: one for his novel A Home at the End of the World (2004) and one for Evening (2007), based on a novel by Susan Minot. At this writing, Cunningham was teaching creative writing at Yale University and lived in Manhattan.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT
This is a great short book inspired by another great short book. So, question number one is obvious: Must one read Mrs. Dalloway before reading this book?
The honest, short answer is: No. With a bit of guidance, you could read The Hours without reading Mrs. Dalloway. But why would you?
Mrs. Dalloway is about one woman, Clarissa Dalloway, going about her day in London in June 1923 as she plans for a party that same evening. Simple.
An homage to the genius of Virginia Woolf and her novel, The Hours is masterful in its own right, fathoming art, love, life, and death—and flowers and parties. Like a talented musician performing variations on a theme by another composer, Cunningham takes the notes and pauses of Virginia Woolf and makes something new and different.
In an essay on Virginia Woolf published in The Guardian, Cunningham described reading Mrs. Dalloway at age fifteen—“to impress a girl who was reading it at the time.” While shaping him as a reader, the experience made a deep artistic impression. “In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf asserts that a day in the life of just about anyone contains, if looked at with sufficient penetration, much of what one needs to know about all human life, in more or less the way the blueprint for an entire organism is present in every strand of its DNA,” wrote Cunningham. “In Mrs Dalloway, and other novels of Woolf’s, we are told that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them.”
Apart from its three vividly drawn central characters and its large, grave concerns, The Hours is filled with finely crafted passages, delicious in their weight—sometimes ethereal, sometimes dense. As Laura Brown makes a birthday cake in her 1949 kitchen, with the help of her three-year-old son, she thinks:
She is going to produce a birthday cake—only a cake—but in her mind at this moment the cake is glossy and resplendent as any photograph in any magazine; it is better, even, than the photographs of cakes in magazines. She imagines making, out of the humblest materials, a cake with all the balance and authority of an urn or a house. The cake will speak of bounty and delight the way a good house speaks of comfort and safety…. Wasn’t a book like Mrs. Dalloway once just empty paper and a pot of ink?
It is Cunningham’s inventiveness and exquisite skill as a novelist that makes this sort of passage referential without making it derivative. And that is no small part of the artistry of The Hours.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Cunningham wrote two novels before The Hours. Both were much admired by critics and both explore family, sex, and relationships. In A Home at the End of the World (1990), two men and a straight woman try to raise a child in a mini-commune in upstate New York. Flesh and Blood (1995) is about the Stassos family, several generations of Greeks ruled by a patriarch. It was lauded by novelist Meg Wolitzer, who wrote, “Grand themes of love, death and loyalty are all played out here at length.”
Written after The Hours, Cunningham’s By Nightfall (2010) also brings together a trio of people—he is clearly interested in sets of three. A New York couple in their forties are unsettled by the unexpected arrival of the wife’s younger brother. Reviewing the book, novelist Jeanette Winterson (see entry) summed up Cunningham’s work:
Cunningham writes so well, and with such an economy of language, that he can call up the poet’s exact match. His dialogue is deft and fast. The pace of the writing is skilled—stretched or contracted at just the right time. And if some of the interventions on art are too long—well, too long for whom? For what? Good novels are novels that provoke us to argue with the writer, not just novels that make us feel magically, mysteriously at home.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: As noted in my Introduction, I am placing this novel after Mrs. Dalloway, which inspired Michael Cunningham. As I also explain, one could read The Hours first.