THE HOURS

Steeped in the work and life of Virginia Woolf, Cunningham (Flesh and Blood, 1995, etc.) offers up a sequel to the work of the great author, complete with her own pathos and brilliance.

Cunningham tells three tales, interweaving them in cunning ways and, after the model of Mrs. Dalloway itself, allowing each only a day in the life of its central character. First comes Woolf herself, in June of 1923 (after a prologue describing her 1941 suicide). In Woolf’s day (as in her writings), little “happens,” though the profundities are great: Virginia works (on Mrs. Dalloway); her sister Vanessa visits; Virginia holds her madness at bay (just barely); and, over dinner, she convinces husband Leonard to move back to London from suburban Richmond. In the “Mrs. Brown” sections, a young woman named Sally Brown reads the novel Mrs. Dalloway, this in suburban L.A. (in 1949), where Sally has a three-year-old son, is pregnant again, and, preparing her husband’s birthday celebration, fights off her own powerful despair. Finally, and at greatest length, is the present-time day in June of “Mrs. Dalloway,” this being one Clarissa Vaughan of West 10th Street, NYC, years ago nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by her then-lover and now-AIDS-victim Richard Brown—who, on this day in June, is to receive a major prize for poetry. Like the original Mrs. Dalloway, this Clarissa is planning a party (for Richard), goes out for flowers, observes the day, sees someone famous, thinks about life, time, the past, and love (“Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other”). Much in fact does happen; much is lost, hoped for, feared, sometimes recovered (“It will serve as this afternoon’s manifestation of the central mystery itself”), all in gorgeous, Woolfian, shimmering, perfectly-observed prose.

Hardly a false note in an extraordinary carrying on of a true greatness that doubted itself.