Brian's Reviews > The Hours

“We want so much, don’t we?”

“The Hours” is one of the best books I have read this year. It is astounding! I was drawn in from the first page; the writing is just beautiful prose.
The setup of the novel is that we drop into the lives of 3 woman: Virginia Woolf while she is beginning to write her novel “Mrs. Dalloway” in 1923, Laura Brown, a housewife reading “Mrs. Dalloway” in LA in 1949, and Clarissa a woman who seems to be a real life Mrs. Dalloway in current NYC. Although this premise is intriguing it pales in comparison to what the author, Michael Cunningham, does with it. Interesting side note, the ever-shifting point of view in this text is not limited to these three characters. We get into the heads of quite a few people in this book, and Cunningham does this at times when the novel needs that shift in perspective. It is a wonderful technical achievement.
In one early chapter, Cunningham writes about a mother’s resentment and uncontrollable love for her child, and it is insanely good. How does a writer capture that massive (and true) contradiction so well and in a manner that conveys to the reader the great human truth of that moment?
The closing pages of this novel are stellar writing (have I mentioned how well written this text is?). The writing in “The Hours” is the kind that makes you love the fact that you are a reader and get to experience it.
This quick read is worth your time. It is literary fiction of the highest order, but also a story with great depth and human beauty to it. Really, when it is all said and done this text is a celebration of life, the good and ill, which the final pages of the novel make abundantly clear.
“Heaven only knows why we love it so.”