| The Hours: Critical Comments & An Excerpt | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
The
Hours The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Passionate, profound, and deeply moving, The Hours is the story of three women: Clarissa Vaughan, who one New York morning goes about planning a party in honor of a beloved friend; Laura Brown, who in a 1950s Los Angeles suburb slowly begins to feel the constraints of a perfect family and home; and Virginia Woolf, recuperating with her husband in a London suburb, and beginning to write Mrs. Dalloway. By the end of the novel, the stories have intertwined, and finally come together in an act of subtle and haunting grace, demonstrating Michael Cunningham's deep empathy for his characters as well as the extraordinary resonance of his prose. Author Reviews "An
exquisitely written, kaleidoscopic work that anchors a floating postmodern
world on premodern caissons of love, grief, and transcendent longing."
"Cunningham
has created something original, a trio of richly interwoven tales... his most mature and masterful work." ". .
. the overall impression is that of a delicate, triumphant glance, an
acknowledgment of Woolf that takes her into Cunningham's own territory,
a place of late-century danger but also of treasurable hours." "It
takes courage to emulate a revered and brilliant writer, not to mention
transforming her into a character."
"In
his smart and playful new novel, Michael Cunningham has revisited, and
masterfully reinvented, Virginia Woolf's great --and greatest -- novel,
Mrs. Dalloway.... The triumph of The Hours is that it somehow manages
to be both artful and sincere, striking nary a false note.... And the
triumph of the book is no less the triumph of its author just when it
seemed that it was no longer permissible to pay respect to the literature
of the past, Cunningham has done so with an undeniable skill and depth
of feeling." "Cunningham
writes beautifully about relationships, living and dying, and love... it's hard not to audibly gasp with both pleasure and shock." "Luxurious.... The Hours tells three interwoven stories; Woolf's novel echoes through
all of them in interesting and uncanny ways.... Cunningham writes with
an empathy that approaches Woolf's." "The
Hours is one of the most ambitious, tightly conceived, and beautifully
written of this season's fiction offerings.... Cunningham has written
lyrically, and has inhabited Woolf's prose magnificently." "Cunningham
dazzles in his inspired novel The Hours." "[A]
fine novel... bringing to light the buried connection his three characters
share, capturing in each the illuminating and transforming moment."
"[The
Hours] is both a clever tribute to the life and work of Virginia Woolf,
and a brilliant examination of the quietly desperate lives of three women."
"His
language is always on key, unfailing and measured, rich without sating,
and haunting in the way Woolf's is. It is resonant with the suggestiveness
of suppressed desires and unexpressed needs." "Intricate... richly imagined... a profoundly compassionate meditation on life
and death." "What,
[Cunningham] essentially asks in The Hours, is it like to grow up and
older, to succeed and fail, to have friends and lovers and children and
parents who delight and disappoint, provide joy and sorrow?" "[An]
ambitious and largely successful attempt to weave the life and sensibility
of Virginia Woolf into a story of his own characters." "[A]
brilliant tour de force... His ending is surprising and stunning. This
is a skillfully wrought novel thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Virginia
Woolf and crafted in keeping with her rare excellence." "Brilliant... haunting -- winding skeins of words that, as they unspool, render
vividly the three heroines' complex interior lives." "Rich
and beautifully nuanced scenes follow one upon the other... [a] gargantuan
accomplishment." "[Al
remarkable new novel... A concise, brilliant rendering of three eras."
"Clever
and beautifully rendered.... In meshing the women's inner lives with
Woolf's insights and themes, Cunningham creates a richly layered whole
that suggests what we can reasonably ask of life." "Cunningham
here undertakes perhaps one of the most daunting literary projects imaginable.... Cunningham's portrait of Woolf is heartbreaking.... With The
Hours, Cunningham has done the impossible: he has taken a canonical work
of literature and, in reworking it, made it his own." "A novel
so mesmerizing and true that it echoes not only in the mind but also in
the heart long after it has had its final say.... Triumphant... In paying homage to one visionary writer, Cunningham has proved himself
to be another." "Brilliant... It's the work of a talented writer taking an adventurous plunge
below the obvious surface of things. The Hours has the heft of flesh and
blood, the subtlety of art." "At
its best, and that is a lyrical, crystalline best, The Hours embodies
a balance between lethal, life-changing vision and the daily, mundane
work of caring, writing, and actually changing one's world." Excerpt Prologue 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. She walks past one of the farm workers (is his name John?), a robust, small-headed man wearing a potato-colored vest, cleaning the ditch that runs through the osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks down again into the brown water. As she passes him on her way to the river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric. Patches of sky shine in puddles left over from last night's rain. Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they've gone somewhere else. The voices are back and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself. The headache is approaching and it seems (is she or is she not conjuring them herself?) that the bombers have appeared again in the sky. She reaches the embankment, climbs over and down again to the river. There's a fisherman upriver, far away, he won't notice her, will he? She begins searching for a stone. She works quickly but methodically, as if she were following a recipe that must be obeyed scrupulously if it's to succeed at all. She selects one roughly the size and shape of a pig's skull. Even as she lifts it and forces it into one of the pockets of her coat (the fur collar tickles her neck), she can't help noticing the stone's cold chalkiness and its color, a milky brown with spots of green. She stands close to the edge of the river, which laps against the bank, filling the small irregularities in the mud with clear water that might be a different substance altogether from the yellow-brown, dappled stuff, solid-looking as a road, that extends so steadily from bank to bank. She steps forward. She does not remove her shoes. The water is cold, but not unbearably so. She pauses, standing in cold water up to her knees. She thinks of Leonard. She thinks of his hands and his beard, the deep lines around his mouth. She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and Ethel: So many. They have all failed, haven't they? She is suddenly, immensely sorry for them. She imagines turning around, taking the stone out of her pocket, going back to the house. She could probably return in time to destroy the notes. She could live on; she could perform that final kindness. Standing knee-deep in the moving water, she decides against it. The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if she restores herself to the care of Leonard and Vanessa they won't let her go again, will they? She decides to insist that they let her go. She wades awkwardly (the bottom is mucky) out until she is up to her waist. She glances upriver at the fisherman, who is wearing a red jacket and who does not see her. The yellow surface of the river (more yellow than brown when seen this close) murkily reflects the sky. Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water. Almost involuntarily (it feels involuntary, to her) she steps or stumbles forward, and the stone pulls her in. For a moment, still, it seems like nothing; it seems like another failure; just chill water she can easily swim back out of; but then the current wraps itself around her and takes her with such sudden, muscular force it feels as if a strong man has risen from the bottom, grabbed her legs and held them to his chest. It feels personal. More than an hour later, her husband returns from the garden. "Madame went out," the maid says, plumping a shabby pillow that releases a miniature storm of down. "She said she'd be back soon." Leonard goes upstairs to the sitting room to listen to the news. He finds a blue envelope, addressed to him, on the table. Inside is a letter.
Leonard races from the room, runs downstairs. He says to the maid, "I think something has happened to Mrs. Woolf. I think she may have tried to kill herself. Which way did she go? Did you see her leave the house?" The maid, panicked, begins to cry. Leonard rushes out and goes to the river, past the church and the sheep, past the osier bed. At the riverbank he finds no one but a man in a red jacket, fishing. She is borne quickly along by the current. She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind. She floats, heavily, through shafts of brown, granular light. She does not travel far. Her feet (the shoes are gone) strike the bottom occasionally, and when they do they summon up a sluggish cloud of muck, filled with the black silhouettes of leaf skeletons, that stands all but stationary in the water after she has passed along out of sight. Stripes of green-black weed catch in her hair and the fur of her coat, and for a while her eyes are blindfolded by a thick swatch of weed, which finally loosens itself and floats, twisting and untwisting and twisting again. She comes to rest, eventually, against one of the pilings of the bridge at Southease. The current presses her, worries her, but she is firmly positioned at the base of the squat, square column, with her back to the river and her face against the stone. She curls there with one arm folded against her chest and the other afloat over the rise of her hip. Some distance above her is the bright, rippled surface. The sky reflects unsteadily there, white and heavy with clouds, traversed by the black cutout shapes of rooks. Cars and trucks rumble over the bridge. A small boy, no older than three, crossing the bridge with his mother, stops at the rail, crouches, and pushes the stick he's been carrying between the slats of the railing so it will fall into the water. His mother urges him along but he insists on staying awhile, watching the stick as the current takes it. Here they are, on a day early in the Second World War: the boy and his mother on the bridge, the stick floating over the water's surface, and Virginia's body at the river's bottom, as if she is dreaming of the surface, the stick, the boy and his mother, the sky and the rooks. An olive-drab truck rolls across the bridge, loaded with soldiers in uniform, who wave to the boy who has just thrown the stick. He waves back. He demands that his mother pick him up so he can see the soldiers better; so he will be more visible to them. All this enters the bridge, resounds through its wood and stone, and enters Virginia's body. Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all: the truck and the soldiers, the mother and the child. Copyright © 1998 Michael Cunningham Used by permission. ... ...... ...... ...... ......
... ...... ...... ...... ......
|
Explore Classic Literature
Must Reads
About.com Special Features
How to Ace the GRE
Being well prepared is the first step; here are more essential suggestions. More >
The Business School Lowdown
Everything from choosing a school and applying, to employment after graduation. More >
©2009 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company.
All rights reserved.