Reading Michael Cunningham’s The Hours immediately after finishing Mrs. Dalloway reveals the risks of literary homage. The story unfolds as a triptych: Virginia Woolf in the 1920s writing her novel, a housewife in 1940s California attempting to read it, and in the 1990s, a woman named Clarissa preparing a party for her dying friend.
At times, it slips into pastiche: “She will go, she thinks, to London; she will simply go to London, like Nelly on an errand… What a lark! What a plunge!” The borrowed words arrive without the pressure that produced them. Woolf’s exhilaration was hard-won; Cunningham’s sounds performed.
The Woolf sections affect most deeply, particularly the imagined account of her suicide. The rest often feels overwritten, the pleasure diminishing with each chapter. Without Mrs. Dalloway, the structure would feel thin. With it, the mimicry becomes difficult to ignore. The 1990s Clarissa lives with Sally. Richard, once her lover, is a poet and a dying man. Some scenes verge on caricature. The emotion never fully lands.
It’s not a failure, but a demonstration of the difficulty: inhabiting another’s voice too closely, you risk producing not an echo but a diminishment.
>Dear Sir,You have perfectly captured my feeling about the experience. I spent a lot of time wondering what was wrong with me that I couldn't appreciate the book when I had liked Virginia Woolf so much, and I realized that it was in part because I liked her work so much that as well-intentioned as _The Hours_ might have been, it did not capture for me the essence of Virginia Woolf. Not that it necessarily needed to; but, one would hope in a book about both her and one of her more famous characters there would have been a hint.I really didn't care for it at all.shalomSteven
>StevenThank you for your comments. I am pleased to have my antipathy to The Hours confirmed by a serious reader. The volume of enthusiastic reviews had me wondering whether I had somehow missed the essence of the book.The market for The Hours I suspect is readers who will not read Virginia Woolf.Anthony
>Dear Anthony,I thought of this after the fact, but thought I would share it becaue it seemed apropos. There are some books (events, movies, you name it) that really deserved the George Saunders quip in _All About Eve_ "It will make the minutes fly like hours."shalom,Steven
>StevenThere are two significant metaphysical inventions I hope will come to pass: a fast forward button (its opposite would also be nice) and a "ctrl-f" find button for life.Anthony