Lifting Virginia Woolf's original (and perhaps more appropriate) title for "Mrs. Dalloway," Michael Cunningham attempts in "The Hours" to craft a worthy sequel to Woolf's seminal ode to life, London and modernity. And he almost pulls it off.
Taken on its own terms, "The Hours," winner of last year's PEN/Faulkner award, is a beguiling and deeply moving delight, supple and elegantly crafted. Unfortunately, it can't stand on its own. Reading "The Hours" without having read "Mrs. Dalloway" would undoubtedly hinder one's ability to enjoy Cunningham's novel, causing allusions and parallels to leap over the reader's head.
As a result, "The Hours" doesn't quite transcend its origins. It's unlikely that any novel could exist on the same exquisite plane as "Mrs. Dalloway," particularly when the blueprint of the Woolf's masterpiece is so clearly visible underneath. At its worst, "The Hours" feels less like a sequel than a contemporary rewrite.
This feeling, though, doesn't come about often, and "The Hours," despite its debt to a source text, is a daring imaginative act. It begins with a matter-of-fact, strangely uplifting evocation of Woolf's suicide in 1941, mapping the battle between sanity and madness that she realizes there's only one way to win. Cunningham has no reservations about entering one of the greatest and most influential minds of the century, and he does so compellingly and convincingly.
As the title indicates, the story is telescoped to brief timeframes, but while Woolf synthesizes the consciousness of several Londoners in a single day, Cunningham glides through several decades with equal fluidity. He alternates between three days, three generations, and three women: Clarissa Vaughan, a middle-aged publisher in present-day New York for whom the parallels to Clarissa Dalloway are unavoidable; Laura Brown, a housewife in 1949 Los Angeles; and Woolf herself, frustratingly cloistered in the London suburb of Richmond as she begins "Mrs. Dalloway."
Laura's day, banal on the surface but existentially charged on the interior, is easily the most compelling of the three, and Cunningham's evocation of Woolf's mind displays his imagination at his boldest. As for Clarissa, on one level the reader has to suspend disbelief that she could have a day so similar to Clarissa Dalloway's and not realize it, particularly since her friend Richard, a gay poet dying of AIDS, insists on calling her "Mrs. Dalloway." She is throwing a party; she has to buy flowers; she is denied an invitation to lunch that her spouse receives; her daughter is chummy with an older woman of whose ideology Clarissa does not approve. The parallels go on and on, as if Clarissa were compelled by fate to recall her literary counterpart.
However, in transferring the world of "Mrs. Dalloway" to contemporary New York, Cunningham adroitly looks at it through the kaleidoscope of bent genders and altered sexual identities. One could claim, indefensibly but nonetheless appropriately, that Cunningham writes the way Woolf, with her own confused sexuality, would if she were alive today and living in New York. In "Mrs. Dalloway," Woolf treats a lesbian kiss as a taboo and a passing fancy of youth, not as something indicative of an alternative sexual identity.
In present-day New York, homosexuality is so accepted, so ordinary, that the situation is reversed. Clarissa has lived with a woman named Sally for 15 years, and they have settled into a comfortable, almost stifling, domesticity. Meanwhile, she fondly recalls her summer-long romance with Richard when they were both 18, and posits, "[we] might have been husband and wife, soul mates, with lovers on the side." It's a fascinating inquiry into gender roles, as Cunningham wonders whether true love is enough to transcend any limiting notions of lesbian or gay identity.
Cunningham also does an extraordinary job capturing New York itself. He doesn't turn it into another London; it's monstrous, brutal, beautiful - "tough and romantic," as Woody Allen would say. Like Woolf, he captures the force of human existence amid the clamor:
"New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this; mornings invaded everywhere by an assertion of new life so determined it is almost comic, like a cartoon character that endures endless, hideous punishments and always emerges unburnt, unscarred, ready for more."
After the briefest of epiphanies, the time and place shift, and Cunningham handles the two period settings with equal grace. His own insight into the writing process informs his exploration of Woolf's interior battle to produce greatness. "One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper," she muses, a statement that rings true to anyone who has ever put pen to paper or fingers to word processor.
Woolf's relationship with her husband, Leonard, is presented tenderly. It is no longer sexual: Leonard acts as her caretaker, guardian and best friend. Perhaps the Woolfs offer a prototype of how Richard and Clarissa's marriage would have functioned if it were more than a passing fancy.
The most conventional marriage in the book, between Laura Brown and her husband, Dan, in postwar L.A., soon becomes the most intriguingly problematic. Laura understands why returning World War II veterans, her husband included, seek the comforts of conventional domesticity, and while she does her best to provide them, she knows she isn't ideal for the role. A lifelong bookworm, Laura cannot bear to get out of bed and face "perfect" family life until she has read something, and on this day, of course, she begins "Mrs. Dalloway."
Laura's husband demands little, but she also must deal with her fiercely, painfully Oedipal son, Richie, a three-year-old of uncommon sensitivity and insight. Dan's departure for work produces an interior crisis: "With her husband present, she is more nervous but less afraid. She knows how to act. Alone with Richie, she sometimes feels unmoored - she is so entirely, persuasively herself. ... She can't always remember how a mother would act."
Her day is ripe for subversion, and she soon finds it, sharing a near-kiss on the lips with her neighbor, Kitty, and, later, in a more drastic move, dropping Richie off at a babysitter's and driving into the city, checking into a hotel to be alone with her book. But she has to come back to the knowing disapproval of her son, and the domestic world eventually, disconcertingly, reclaims her.
But Laura experiences moments of extreme clarity as the hours progress, as do Virginia and Clarissa, and the novel's true subject is the ability to recall and savor these moments as paramount to one's identity, one's life. Clarissa's memory of a kiss with Richard brings her to deep insight about her - and the human - experience: "There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other."
"Mrs. Dalloway" explores this idea as well, and in his integration of Woolf's novel into all three settings of "The Hours," Cunningham charts the evolution of its influence through the generations. He moves from Woolf writing it, to Laura reading it and absorbing its subversive ideas, to Clarissa living it in the present day, but in such a way that reworks the social conventions to which its characters adhere.
It could not have existed without "Mrs. Dalloway," but while at its weakest "The Hours" comes off as derivative, at its strongest it feels like a tribute. Cunningham has a deep understanding of our interior lives, and even if he says what has been said before, and more beautifully, the way he says it is still worthy - and beautiful.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
