The Hours

A beautiful ‘second-degree’ or ‘piggy back’ novel written by Michael Cunningham and having been made into a film starring Nicole Kidman (with a great false nose), Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep, The Hours delivers a mesmerising sensory experience of being blissfully lost within the moments that make up the hours of our days. Making the mundane momentous and bringing a new depth to the magic of intertextuality, Cunningham won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999 for this work and it is not hard to understand why. 

In 1920s Richmond, Virginia Woolf struggles between her mental illness and her attempts to begin on her new novel. In 1940s Los Angeles a suburban housewife struggles to fulfil her duties as wife and mother when all she really wants to do is escape and read her precious copy of Mrs. Dalloway. In 1990s New York, Clarissa Vaughn is buying flowers for a party she’s throwing for a dying friend. 

A beautiful retelling of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham’s novel is a gorgeous work and one of the few books that I’ve read recently that really delivers a wondrous sensory experience. As I was reading this, I found myself completely dislocated in time and space, just floating through life without any consciousness of the minutes going past. And you know what? I absolutely adored it. I find that it’s a rare thing for a book to be able to achieve that level of reader displacement so completely without being overly distressing and, for me, that was the major thing that I loved about this book. 

What Cunningham does is split the Mrs. Dalloway story between three female protagonists: one is writing it, one is reading it, and one is living it. But what’s particularly poignant is the fact that Woolf’s novel is not the only continuous theme that ties these three women together. As a writer interested in the literary exploration and depiction of homosexuality and bisexuality (along with the Pulitzer, he won the Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered Book Award), Cunningham explores various themes of sexuality (primarily homosexual and bisexual through Clarissa Vaughn’s living in an open domestic lesbian relationship and Laura Brown’s closeted sexual curiosities) as well as mental illness (Virginia Woolf’s hearing voices and depression), and recurrent themes of death (suicide, HIV, and darker moments where one considers death’s simplicity). 

Surprisingly and charmingly enough, despite the fact that the novel explores some darker and grim themes such as depression, illness, and death, Cunningham writes in such a way that just makes everything flow and shine so beautifully that the tragedy of the book is made all the more poignant and mesmerising. Splitting the stream-of-consciousness of Mrs. Dalloway between the third person omniscient narratives of three different women in different times, Cunningham manages to create this really rich and complex story that really is just telling the mundane events of one day. His use of repetition and his deceleration of events by cramming them full of shimmering little details that allows us to just get lost in them plays beautifully against the events that he accelerates and skips over quickly, making their shock value more pronounced and felt harder. 

Above all, this book is quite sensory as opposed to just literarily masterful, and that is why I loved it so much. 

Filled with drama, romance, and a little bit of tragedy all deliciously wrapped up in this wondrous coating of intertextuality and metaphor, The Hours is a beautiful book! Rich and complex in its techniques, yet remarkably simple to read and lose yourself in; I absolutely adored it!