The Hours

bThe Barnes Noble Review/bbrIThe Hours/I is Michael Cunningham’s crystalline meditation on consciousness and identity, drawing on Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, IMrs. Dalloway/I — a postmodern masterpiece whose minimal action takes place on a single June day in postwar London.p
IThe Hours/I progresses in fuguelike fashion: First we meet Clarissa Vaughan, a New York book editor dubbed “Mrs Dalloway” by her longtime friend and former lover Richard. Next, Cunningham presents Woolf herself, beginning work in 1923 on what is to become IMrs. Dalloway/I. And finally we are introduced to Laura Brown, a California housewife who is avidly reading Woolf’s novel. p
Scenes from these three narratives are presented in recurrent identical succession: “Mrs. Dalloway,” Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Brown — all bristling with connections and startling parallels. The “Mrs. Dalloway” strand is particularly rich, filled as it is with one-to-one correspondences to Woolf’s novel. But the deepest and most important thing that IThe Hours/I shares with IMrs. Dalloway/I is “the feeling,” as Woolf called it, “that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” Cunningham’s three women proceed through the day, through the hours, trying to keep themselves psychologically intact, like someone carrying a glass of water filled to the brim through a crowd and endeavoring not to spill it. They hesitate before plunging into the day because they know how hard it is to live in the world and remain identical with oneself. And they puzzle over a universal dilemma: how to bring the self into the world without its getting broken in the process. In IThe Hours,/I Michael Cunningham has explored this dilemma with an impressive and moving subtlety worthy of his great precursor. IBenjamin Kunkel/I