“The overall impression is that of a delicate, triumphant glance, an acknowledgement of Woolf that takes her into Cunningham's own territory, a place of late-century danger but also of treasurable hours.”
―Michael Wood, The New York Times Book Review
“An exquisitely written, kaleidoscopic work that anchors a floating postmodern world on pre-modern caissons of love, grief and transcendent longing.”
―Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review
“[Cunningham] has deftly created something original, a trio of richly interwoven tales that alternate with one another chapter by chapter, each of them entering the thoughts of a character as she moves through the small details of a day . . . Cunningham's emulation of such a revered writer as Woolf is courageous, and this is his most mature and masterful work.”
―Jameson Currier, The Washington Post Book World
“Rich and beautifully nuanced scenes follow one upon the other . . . [a] gargantuan accomplishment.”
―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A smashing literary tour de force and an utterly invigorating reading experience. If this book does not make you jump up from the sofa, looking at life and literature in new ways, check to see if you have a pulse.”
―Ann Prichard, USA Today
“Cunningham has created something original, a trio of richly interwoven tales...his most mature and masterful work.”
―The Washington Post Book World
“The Hours is in fact a lovely triumph. Cunningham honors both Mrs. Dalloway and its creator with unerring sensitivity, thanks to his modesty of intention and his sovereignly affecting prose . . . With his elliptical evocation of Mrs. Dalloway, he has managed to pay great but quiet tribute―reminding us of the gorgeous, ferocious beauty of what endures.”
―Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe
“In his smart and playful new novel, Michael Cunningham has revisited, and masterfully reinvented, Virginia Woolf’s great―and greatest―novel, Mrs. Dalloway . . . The triumph of The Hours is that it somehow manages to be both artful and sincere, striking nary a false note . . . And the triumph of the book is no less the triumph of its author. Just when it seemed that it was no longer permissible to pay respect to the literature of the past, Cunningham has done so with an undeniable skill and depth of feeling.”
―Justin Cronin, Philadelphia Inquirer
“Cunningham writes beautifully about relationships, living and dying, and love…it’s hard not to audibly gasp with both pleasure and shock.”
―Detroit Free Press
“Luxurious . . . The Hours tells three interwoven stories; Woolf’s novel echoes through all of them in interesting and uncanny ways…. Cunningham writes with an empathy that approaches Woolf’s.”
―Lisa Cohen, Newsday
“The Hours is one of the most ambitious, tightly conceived, and beautifully written of this season’s fiction offerings . . . Cunningham has written lyrically, and has inhabited Woolf’s prose magnificently.”
―Amy Blair, The Boston Book Review
“Cunningham dazzles in his inspired novel The Hours.”
―Vanity Fair
“[A] fine novel . . . bringing to light the buried connection his three characters share, capturing in each the illuminating and transforming moment.”
―Dallas Morning News
“[The Hours] is both a clever tribute to the life and work of Virginia Woolf, and a brilliant examination of the quietly desperate lives of three women.”
―Seattle Times
“His language is always on key, unfailing and measured, rich without sating, and haunting in the way Woolf’s is. It is resonant with the suggestiveness of suppressed desires and unexpressed needs.”
―Alyce Miller, Chicago Tribune
“Intricate . . . richly imagined . . . a profoundly compassionate meditation on life and death.”
―Elle
“What, [Cunningham] essentially asks in The Hours, is it like to grow up and older, to succeed and fail, to have friends and lovers and children and parents who delight and disappoint, provide joy and sorrow?”
―Charles Ganee, Vogue
“[An] ambitious and largely successful attempt to weave the life and sensibility of Virginia Woolf into a story of his own characters.”
―New York
“[A] brilliant tour de force . . . His ending is surprising and stunning. This is a skillfully wrought novel thoroughly imbued with the spirit of Virginia Woolf and crafted in keeping with her rare excellence.”
―The Miami Herald
“Brilliant . . . haunting―winding skeins of words that, as they unspool, render vividly the three heroines’ complex interior lives.”
―St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“[A] remarkable new novel . . . A concise, brilliant rendering of three eras.”
―Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Clever and beautifully rendered . . . In meshing the women’s inner lives with Woolf’s insights and themes, Cunningham creates a richly layered whole that suggests what we can reasonably ask of life.”
―The Roanoke Times
“Cunningham here undertakes perhaps one of the most daunting literary projects imaginable . . . Cunningham’s portrait of Woolf is heartbreaking . . . With The Hours, Cunningham has done the impossible: he has taken a canonical work of literature and, in reworking it, made it his own.”
―Yale Book Review
“A novel so mesmerizing and true that it echoes not only in the mind but also in the heart long after it has had its final say . . . Triumphant . . . In paying homage to one visionary writer, Cunningham has proved himself to be another.”
―New York Daily News
“Brilliant . . . It’s the work of a talented writer taking an adventurous plunge below the obvious surface of things. The Hours has the heft of flesh and blood, the subtlety of art.”
―The Hartford Courant
“At its best, and that is a lyrical, crystalline best, The Hours embodies a balance between lethal, life-changing vision and the daily, mundane work of caring, writing, and actually changing one’s world.”
―City Pages
Awards/Mentions:
National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee, National Book Critics Circle Awards - Nominee, PEN/Faulkner Award Winner, ALA Stonewall Book Award - Winner, Boston Book Review - Nominee, Book Sense Book of the Year Award - Nominee, International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award - Nominee, Triangle Awards - Winner, National Books Critics Circle Awards - Nominee, Pulitzer Prize Winner, ALA Notable Books - Winner, Lambda Literary Award - Nominee
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Copyright © 1998 by Michael Cunningham. To be published in November, 1998 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.
She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. It is 1941. Another war has begun. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa. She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she'll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky. She pauses, watching the sheep and the sky, then walks on. The voices murmur behind her; bombers drone in the sky, though she looks for the planes and can't see them. She walks past one of the farm workers (is his name John?), a robust, small-headed man wearing a potato-colored vest, cleaning the ditch that runs through the osier bed. He looks up at her, nods, looks down again into the brown water. As she passes him on her way to the river she thinks of how successful he is, how fortunate, to be cleaning a ditch in an osier bed. She herself has failed. She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric. Patches of sky shine in puddles left over from last night's rain. Her shoes sink slightly into the soft earth. She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they've gone somewhere else. The voices are back and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself. The headache is approaching and it seems (is she or is she not conjuring them herself?) that the bombers have appeared again in the sky. She reaches the embankment, climbs over and down again to the river. There's a fisherman upriver, far away, he won't notice her, will he? She begins searching for a stone. She works quickly but methodically, as if she were following a recipe that must be obeyed scrupulously if it's to succeed at all. She selects one roughly the size and shape of a pig's skull. Even as she lifts it and forces it into one of the pockets of her coat (the fur collar tickles her neck), she can't help noticing the stone's cold chalkiness and its color, a milky brown with spots of green. She stands close to the edge of the river, which laps against the bank, filling the small irregularities in the mud with clear water that might be a different substance altogether from the yellow-brown, dappled stuff, solid-looking as a road, that extends so steadily from bank to bank. She steps forward. She does not remove her shoes. The water is cold, but not unbearably so. She pauses, standing in cold water up to her knees. She thinks of Leonard. She thinks of his hands and his beard, the deep lines around his mouth.
She thinks of Vanessa, of the children, of Vita and Ethel: So many. They have all failed, haven't they? She is suddenly, immensely sorry for them. She imagines turning around, taking the stone out of her pocket, going back to the house. She could probably return in time to destroy the notes. She could live on; she could perform that final kindness. Standing knee-deep in the moving water, she decides against it. The voices are here, the headache is coming, and if she restores herself to the care of Leonard and Vanessa they won't let her go again, will they? She decides to insist that they let her go. She wades awkwardly (the bottom is mucky) out until she is up to her waist. She glances upriver at the fisherman, who is wearing a red jacket and who does not see her. The yellow surface of the river (more yellow than brown when seen this close) murkily reflects the sky. Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water. Almost involuntarily (it feels involuntary, to her) she steps or stumbles forward, and the stone pulls her in. For a moment, still, it seems like nothing; it seems like another failure; just chill water she can easily swim back out of; but then the current wraps itself around her and takes her with such sudden, muscular force it feels as if a strong man has risen from the bottom, grabbed her legs and held them to his chest. It feels personal.
More than an hour later, her husband returns from the garden. "Madame went out," the maid says, plumping a shabby pillow that releases a miniature storm of down. "She said she'd be back soon."
Leonard goes upstairs to the sitting room to listen to the news. He finds a blue envelope, addressed to him, on the table. Inside is a letter.
Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going
mad again: I feel we can't go
through another of these terrible times.
And I shant recover this time. I begin
to hear voices, and cant concentrate.
So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have
given me
the greatest possible happiness. You
have been in every way all that anyone
could be. I dont think two
people could have been happier till
this terrible disease came. I cant
fight it any longer, I know that I am
spoiling your life, that without me you
could work. And you will I know.
You see I cant even write this properly. I
cant read. What I want to say is that
I owe all the happiness of my life to you.
You have been entirely patient with me &
incredibly good. I want to say that--
everybody knows it. If anybody could
have saved me it would have been you.
Everything has gone from me but the
certainty of your goodness. I
cant go on spoiling your life any longer. I dont think two
people
could have been happier than we have been. V.
Leonard races from the room, runs downstairs. He says to the maid, "I think something has happened to Mrs. Woolf. I think she may have tried to kill herself. Which way did she go? Did you see her leave the house?"
The maid, panicked, begins to cry. Leonard rushes out and goes to the river, past the church and the sheep, past the osier bed. At the riverbank he finds no one but a man in a red jacket, fishing.
She is borne quickly along by the current. She appears to be flying, a fantastic figure, arms outstretched, hair streaming, the tail of the fur coat billowing behind. She floats, heavily, through shafts of brown, granular light. She does not travel far. Her feet (the shoes are gone) strike the bottom occasionally, and when they do they summon up a sluggish cloud of muck, filled with the black silhouettes of leaf skeletons, that stands all but stationary in the water after she has passed along out of sight. Stripes of green-black weed catch in her hair and the fur of her coat, and for a while her eyes are blindfolded by a thick swatch of weed, which finally loosens itself and floats, twisting and untwisting and twisting again.
She comes to rest, eventually, against one of the pilings of the bridge at Southease. The current presses her, worries her, but she is firmly positioned at the base of the squat, square column, with her back to the river and her face against the stone. She curls there with one arm folded against her chest and the other afloat over the rise of her hip. Some distance above her is the bright, rippled surface. The sky reflects unsteadily there, white and heavy with clouds, traversed by the black cutout shapes of rooks. Cars and trucks rumble over the bridge. A small boy, no older than three, crossing the bridge with his mother, stops at the rail, crouches, and pushes the stick he's been carrying between the slats of the railing so it will fall into the water. His mother urges him along but he insists on staying awhile, watching the stick as the current takes it.
Here they are, on a day early in the Second World War: the boy and his mother on the bridge, the stick floating over the water's surface, and Virginia's body at the river's bottom, as if she is dreaming of the surface, the stick, the boy and his mother, the sky and the rooks. An olive-drab truck rolls across the bridge, loaded with soldiers in uniform, who wave to the boy who has just thrown the stick. He waves back. He demands that his mother pick him up so he can see the soldiers better; so he will be more visible to them. All this enters the bridge, resounds through its wood and stone, and enters Virginia's body. Her face, pressed sideways to the piling, absorbs it all: the truck and the soldiers, the mother and the child.
