The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
The woman's head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked.
Cunningham's book is inexorably intertwined with Virginia Woolf's book Mrs. dalloway. Here's what I had to say about Mrs. Dalloway in my October 2009 Bookpost:
" If this one wasn't so short, I might not have bothered finishing with it. Neither the plot, the characters nor the language are particularly memorable. From the introduction, I'm told that Mrs. Dalloway is an experiment in Joycean stream-of-consciousness writing. It is not. I'm told that the heroine is an example of a Strong Modern Woman. She is not, unless slight lesbian overtones are all that it takes. The character is a typical English lady between the wars, and has mostly put her own desires on hold in favor of her dull, successful husband. I'm told she is also an exuberant optimist. That much the book says. However, if it hadn't said so, I wouldn't have been able to tell from any of her actions. She spends most of the book planning a party, and then hosting it, and disappearing from it, and most of the book is told from the point of view of other characters, who are mostly not thinking about her. For me, the defining moment of her character is when she learns that someone has committed suicide, and her immediate thought is to tut-tut that the news might dampen the atmosphere of her party. The best parts are about the callous and counterproductive way that the mentally infirm are treated..... The impact on me was almost negligible. I take it as a sign that I’m no longer as neurotic as I used to be."
So here we have The Hours, the book version about Woolf and two generations of neurotic women who follow and are influenced by the flower-purchasing, stream-of-consciousness sharing heroine of her novel. In alternating chapters, Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway in 1923; A California housewife named Laura Brown reads the novel in 1941 while planning her husband's birthday, exploring bisexuality along with Woolf, and warping her toddler's mind; yet another woman (named Vaughn but nicknamed "Dalloway" by her poet-friend who is dying of AIDS and failing to cope with it) experiments with bisexuality in 1998 while planning a party in honor of the poet. Planning for the party involves---YES! Buying flowers.
It's a big homage to an author loved by people different from me, sharing Woolf's characters, themes and writing style, and possibly showing that the human, or at least, the female condition, hasn't changed much in 100 years of progress. As with Woolf's original, there is flower-purchasing. There is suicide. There is bisexuality. There is a lot of stream-of-consciousness meant to reveal characters' minds as lovely, delicate, vulnerable flowers but which struck me as revealing the characters to be stultified and mundane. A plot detail that I had taken for granted is presented at the end as if it were a shocking Big Reveal tying up the separate plot lines in a way I wasn't supposed to expect.
It's brief and maybe thought provoking, and probably of significant academic, if not entertainment, value, and may well be loved by people different from me
The woman's head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked.
Cunningham's book is inexorably intertwined with Virginia Woolf's book Mrs. dalloway. Here's what I had to say about Mrs. Dalloway in my October 2009 Bookpost:
" If this one wasn't so short, I might not have bothered finishing with it. Neither the plot, the characters nor the language are particularly memorable. From the introduction, I'm told that Mrs. Dalloway is an experiment in Joycean stream-of-consciousness writing. It is not. I'm told that the heroine is an example of a Strong Modern Woman. She is not, unless slight lesbian overtones are all that it takes. The character is a typical English lady between the wars, and has mostly put her own desires on hold in favor of her dull, successful husband. I'm told she is also an exuberant optimist. That much the book says. However, if it hadn't said so, I wouldn't have been able to tell from any of her actions. She spends most of the book planning a party, and then hosting it, and disappearing from it, and most of the book is told from the point of view of other characters, who are mostly not thinking about her. For me, the defining moment of her character is when she learns that someone has committed suicide, and her immediate thought is to tut-tut that the news might dampen the atmosphere of her party. The best parts are about the callous and counterproductive way that the mentally infirm are treated..... The impact on me was almost negligible. I take it as a sign that I’m no longer as neurotic as I used to be."
So here we have The Hours, the book version about Woolf and two generations of neurotic women who follow and are influenced by the flower-purchasing, stream-of-consciousness sharing heroine of her novel. In alternating chapters, Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway in 1923; A California housewife named Laura Brown reads the novel in 1941 while planning her husband's birthday, exploring bisexuality along with Woolf, and warping her toddler's mind; yet another woman (named Vaughn but nicknamed "Dalloway" by her poet-friend who is dying of AIDS and failing to cope with it) experiments with bisexuality in 1998 while planning a party in honor of the poet. Planning for the party involves---YES! Buying flowers.
It's a big homage to an author loved by people different from me, sharing Woolf's characters, themes and writing style, and possibly showing that the human, or at least, the female condition, hasn't changed much in 100 years of progress. As with Woolf's original, there is flower-purchasing. There is suicide. There is bisexuality. There is a lot of stream-of-consciousness meant to reveal characters' minds as lovely, delicate, vulnerable flowers but which struck me as revealing the characters to be stultified and mundane. A plot detail that I had taken for granted is presented at the end as if it were a shocking Big Reveal tying up the separate plot lines in a way I wasn't supposed to expect.
It's brief and maybe thought provoking, and probably of significant academic, if not entertainment, value, and may well be loved by people different from me