The Hours by
Michael Cunningham

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In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, who is recognized as "one of [America's] very best writers" (Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times), draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The novel opens with an evocation of Woolf's last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of demands of friends, lovers, and family. Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in post-war California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside her stifling marriage. With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two women's lives converge with Virginia Woolf's in an unexpected and heartbreaking way during the party for Richard. As the novel jump-cuts through the twentieth century, every line resonates with Cunningham's clear, strong, suprisingly lyrical contemporary voice.
Passionate, profound and deeply moving, The Hours is Michael Cunninghams most remarkable achievement to date, and has been awarded Pullitzer and Pen/Faulkner prizes. The author was raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York City.

Here's what the members of the Reading Group based at our Raheny branch library think of The Hours:

This is the world of Virginia Woolf. It is June and we are given three parallel days - one a fictional depiction of the day in the early 1920's when Mrs Woolf began writing Mrs Dalloway - then we are in 1949 when Laura Brown, a young married woman in Los Angeles begins to read Mrs Dalloway - the third day is set in New York in the late 1990's where Clarissa Vaughan, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her long-time friend and onetime lover, Richard, sets off to buy flowers for a party later that day. Each of the protagonists is full of anxieties and self-doubt. Laura Brown at life's threshold, cannot decide whether hers is a most enviable position, married to a war hero, with a young son and expecting her second child, or whether she is trapped in a suffocating life. Clarissa Vaughan at fifty, ponders a fateful decision she made some thirty years ago, in withdrawing from the possibility of a lifetime relationship with Poet Richard with whom she continued to maintain a close friendship and who is now dying of AIDS. In the Virginia Woolf thread, she is as ever on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The links between the three lives are cleverly interwoven. The novel is beautifully written. In terms of art one might compare it with a very fine delicate piece of porcelain, but as a creation it must live in the shadow of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.
(Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)

Three women, three lives are the theme of this book - Virginia Woolf in the 1920's, and Michael Cunningham's two fictional characters: Mrs Dalloway, nicknamed after the heroine of the novel living in New York at the end of the 20th century, and Mrs Brown living in Los Angeles in mid-century. Their stories are cleverly intertwined, sometimes echoing the novel, sometimes paralleling it, sometimes diverting from it. This is a complex story of the competing pressures of heterosexual and homosexual love, of family pressures and the desire for freedom, of love of life and the desire to have done with it, what is and what might have been. Mrs Dalloway has perhaps come to terms best with life, having opted for a happy, stable lesbian relationship, but she still wonders what life would have been like with Richard - would it have been richer in spite of the difficulties? The Laura Brown character was less clear to me. She has made the wrong choice in drifting into marriage but does a passing kiss from another woman prove to her that her own sexuality is the reason? Does her desertion of her family indirectly influence her son's life so that it ends tragically? An emphasis on death is balanced by excitement at the simple pleasures of life - walking through a city on a fine morning. I found it a stimulating and enjoyable read.
(Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)