LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
Booked Solid |
a review by Rebecca James |
The Hours, Michael Cunningham 1998 Pulitzer Prize Winner Available in paperback Michael Cunningham's highly readable third novel, The Hours, takes an interesting approach to contemporary literature. Cunningham incorporates the theme and characters of a piece of classic literature, Mrs. Dalloway, as well as aspects of the author's life. Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs. Dalloway in 1925, over a decade after her heterosexual marriage to Leonard Woolf and several years into an affair with "Sapphist" Vita Sackville-West. Her main character's thoughts and actions are often thought to be indicative of her own mixed feelings about the affair. Woolf's diaries show how apprehensive and careful she could be when coding her work; Vita was thought to be the true lesbian while Woolf feared that she would be "attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a Sapphist." Michael Cunningham, a gay writer in the 1990s, draws on extensive research about Woolf's life and writing for his own novel. Read together, the novels create an impressive passage through the latter half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Woolf's last few days before her suicide in 1941, Cunningham introduces the reader to three women, each living in a different time and a different world but with parallels that become quickly apparent. Clarissa Vaughan, a.k.a. Mrs. Dalloway, is a modern middle-aged New Yorker. She's been married for eighteen years to her partner, Sally; they have one grown daughter, Julia (sperm bank). Richard Brown, Clarissa's best friend, is dying with an AIDS-related illness. Clarissa moves through her days as if wondering what she missed. She spends many of her waking moments trying to recapture a feeling of brightness, that one perfect moment she felt years before when the colors seemed bolder and everything was right with the world... and she made a difference. "Laura Brown is trying to lose herself. No, that's not it exactlyshe is trying to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world." Laura Brown is in another timepostwar Californiapregnant with a second child and feeling much the way Clarissa will feel forty-odd years later, except she's not sure she ever knew that moment of perfection. Laura spends days at home alone with her son Richie, a child whom at a young age already shows signs of his mother's depression and sensitivity. Lastly, there is Virginia Woolf, almost two decades before the suicide described in the prologue. All three women are doomed to viewing themselves as characters of some larger novel; they are simultaneously judging themselves from outside their bodies and spending hour after hour in their own heads, wrapped up in their own spiraling speculations. With a suicidal climactic crash, the novel's worlds collide. Richard, perhaps, says it best: "I don't know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that... one and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there's another. I'm so sick". Richard is Cunningham's tie to the women in the novel. He is a physical representation of the pain each woman expresses throughout the book, a gender-unifying theme of exhaustion, hour after hour. Mrs. Dalloway...Virginia Woolf is writing the book, Laura Brown is reading it, Clarissa Vaughan is living the modern version and Michael Cunningham is spinning a thread between them called The Hours. Cunningham's modern character, Clarissa, shares a first name with the original Mrs. Dalloway and a surname with Woolf's real-life first crush on a woman thirteen years her senior, Madge Vaughan. Her daughter's name, Julia, is the name of the main character in one of Woolf's short stories ("Moments of Being: 'Slater's Pins Have No Points'") known to 'queer' readers for its characters' mutual (and timid) attraction. Julia is also the name of Woolf's own mother, who died when Virginia was only thirteen. Cunningham has provided these and other connections without making the pleasure reader feel drowned in a history lesson. Those interested in Virginia Woolf's life, however, will appreciate the experience and information the author brings to the novel. The Hours is definitely a must-read, not to mention a great opportunity to explore a classic author you may have missed. Browseabout bookstore on Rehoboth Avenue will be hosting a discussion group on the two books, The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, in March. Additional biographical source: Faderman, Lillian. Chloe Plus Olivia,1994. Rebecca James lives and works in Rehoboth Beach. She is keeping busy this winter plowing through books with three furry, warm bodies (plus Lori) and a hot cup of tea. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 10, No. 1, Feb. 4, 2000. |