A bunch of gay people in Greenwich Village unconsciously re-enacting Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway? It sounded like one of the worst ideas of all time. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, though, proves once again that when a novelist has the right stuff, he can endow literally any subject with truth, poetry, and intelligence. The Pulitzer Committee, for once, made no mistake when it decided to award its 1999 prize for fiction to this relatively unknown author.

Cunningham has clearly steeped himself in Woolf’s work and style without, thank God, letting the novel become in any way an imitation of her; it is more an echo or a parallel of Mrs Dalloway, or a dialogue with it, than an homage (to use a horrible word). Cunningham has a perfectly good voice of his own and a style blessedly innocent of the preciosity that was Woolf’s principal artistic fault. He attacks the questions raised in Mrs Dalloway with thought and originality: The Hours, like its predecessor, is a meditation on age and decay, on sanity and insanity, on the nature of the creative act, on the ineradicable love for life that continues even in the face of a longing for death. Cunningham’s thoughts on these subjects respond to Woolf’s, but diverge from hers in provocative ways.

The Hours is really three separate stories, woven together in a very clever fashion, and each, like Mrs Dalloway, takes place on a single day in June. One of these involves Woolf herself, at Hogarth House in suburban London in 1923, working on the first draft of Mrs Dalloway, coping with family and servants, and contemplating death or some other form of escape from the loving captivity imposed by her husband, who is worried about her health and her sanity. (Cunningham draws heavily on both Woolfs’ diaries and autobiographical writings.)

The second plot is the modern version of Mrs Dalloway: a day in the life of Clarissa Vaughan, a fifty-two-year-old book editor, successful and placidly content with her longtime lover Sally. In the particular world she inhabits, Clarissa, like Clarissa Dalloway, is in effect a conventional society wife, not so very different, really, from her heterosexual, married counterparts on Park Avenue. Character, Cunningham seems to imply, is destiny, and Clarissa Vaughan, who enjoys every personal liberty that Clarissa Dalloway did not, has ended up with just as dull a life. Clarissa is preparing for a party she is to throw that evening for her best and oldest friend, Richard, a poet in the last stages of AIDS who has just won a fancy literary prize. We accompany her as she shops for flowers, visits Richard, and receives visits in turn from her daughter and friends, and we watch as the evening brings her not the expected celebration but an unexpected tragedy.

The third story, which at first appears to have no connection with either of the others, takes place in 1949 and concerns a young Los Angeles wife and mother, Laura Brown. Solitary, contemplative, an obsessive reader, Laura should never have married, but she was caught up like many another in the philoprogenitive postwar climate. “In another world, she might have spent her whole life reading. But this is the new world, the rescued world—there’s not much room for idleness. So much has been risked and lost; so many have died.” When the war ended, Dan, the returning hero, proposed to her—and what could she say but yes? “She married him out of guilt; out of fear of being alone; out of patriotism. He was simply too good, too kind, too earnest, too sweet-smelling not to marry.”

Now, with a house to look after, a husband she has nothing to say to and a terrifyingly needy three-year-old son, Laura has sunk into what a psychiatrist would term depression but what she, and Cunningham, might call despair. She is simply not equal to the emotional responsibilities she has taken on; she wants only to lie on her bed alone, reading Mrs Dalloway. The book is the reality (her bedroom “feels more densely inhabited, more actual, because a character named Mrs. Dalloway is on her way to buy flowers”), while her life is only the shadow; when she must, at last, get up and join the breakfast preparations downstairs, she is possessed “by a dreamlike feeling, as if she is standing in the wings, about to go onstage and perform in a play for which she is not appropriately dressed, and for which she has not adequately rehearsed.”

As her day progresses, Laura, like Virginia Woolf, makes a brief feint at escape and contemplates suicide; and like Clarissa (in fact like both Clarissas), she prepares a party, in this case a birthday party for her husband, including a cake which fails to live up to her wish for perfection and has to be remade. At times her feeling of dislocation overwhelms her; at other times she succeeds in merging her real self with her ideal one, and “for a moment she is precisely what she appears to be: a pregnant woman kneeling in a kitchen with her three-year-old son. She is herself and she is the perfect picture of herself; there is no difference.”

Virginia Woolf intended Mrs Dalloway to show “the world seen by the sane & the insane, side by side”; in her notes, she states one of her themes to be “Sanity & insanity. Mrs D seeing the sane truth. S[eptimus] S[mith] seeing the insane truth.” Woolf demonstrates in her novel that both the sane and the insane are capable of penetrating to the truth, but that they are different truths. Cunningham’s characters bring us to the same conclusion, and even a little further.

Clarissa Vaughan is the novel’s sane character, as opposed to Richard, Laura, and “Virginia Woolf,” all to one degree or another unbalanced. Her sanity consists in her being willing to find happiness in a reality that is less than it could have been, than what she once dreamed it might be. When she was eighteen and sharing a Cape Cod house with Richard, an impulsive kiss led to a brief love affair. At the end of the summer, though, she came to her senses. After all, they were both gay, weren’t they? And Clarissa, also, “wanted her freedom and Richard wanted, well, too much, didn’t he always? He wanted too much.” Clarissa eventually settles down with a more appropriate mate, Sally, into a more humdrum life.

But as Clarissa ages, it seems to her that when she ended the affair with Richard she abandoned what might have been a “larger and stranger” life. Did she really? Or did the summer’s magic lie more than anything in their youth and sense of infinite possibility —the simple fact that “Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment”?

Clarissa will never know; still, at the time “it had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness. That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.” But being sane Clarissa, rather than insane Richard who wants too much, she embraces what life has given her. Not that she doesn’t have moments of alienation nearly as acute as Laura Brown’s, moments where her familiar home seems like that of a stranger. Still, she gives love and support to her unexciting partner, goes through the social niceties, and is rewarded with moments of visceral joy that nothing can kill, as on this beautiful June morning. “What is the matter with her? She loves Richard, she thinks of him constantly, but she perhaps loves the day slightly more.” The feeling of disjunction between the outer and the inner self that Clarissa feels only as a momentary tremor is for the novel’s “insane” characters the very essence of existence, and each, in the end, proves incapable of enduring it.

To tell all this is only to give the faintest sense of the denseness of Cunningham’s tale, its wealth of ideas, connections, allusions, and, not least, emotion. The final chapter, where he ties the three stories up into one suprising whole, is masterful. So is the description of Clarissa’s evening, when the story’s odd group of survivors sit in her living room partaking of the funeral baked meats that she had originally meant to serve as party hors d’oeuvres, and she reflects on the day behind them.  

We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it’s as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself. There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

It will not have escaped Virginia Woolf fans that Laura Brown—“Mrs Brown”— bears the same name as the hypothetical fictional character in Woolf’s famous essay “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” in which she takes to task her older contemporaries Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H. G. Wells for their lack of psychological depth. (I have always thought she did Wells and Bennett a great injustice; they had their own type of fiction and she had hers, and both are perfectly valid; but that is beside the point.) In naming his character Mrs. Brown, Cunningham in effect accepts Woolf’s stated artistic challenge. He succeeds brilliantly; so much so that in the end he even gives Woolf herself a run for her money.