Book Review: The Hours

Michael Cunningham’s The Hours is a gem of a book. I had not read it when I saw the movie in 2003, and decided not to read it while the movie was still fresh in my mind. I’m glad I waited.

I chose to read it now because I was curious to see how Cunningham had structured a book that contained three stories happening in three different time periods. I am attempting to do something similar in my fourth novel, and I wondered if Cunningham had used any literary “tricks” and whether they were successful or not. (I’m also reading A.S. Byatt’s Possession for the same reasons.)

There are no tricks in The Hours. In fact, it’s outwardly very simple in structure, with alternating chapters using the names of the three main characters: Mrs. Woolf (Virginia), Mrs. Brown (Laura), and Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa Vaughan). But it’s deceptively simple, because, in fact, the narrative thread that connects all three characters and time periods is Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. In the book, Woolf is writing it, Mrs. Brown is reading it, and Clarissa Vaughan (who was given the nickname Mrs. Dalloway years earlier by her former lover, Richard) is living it.

All three women’s lives are touched by homosexuality and suicide. The three time periods, 1923, 1949 and 1999, provide a framework and a milieu that illustrate the ways in which our attitudes have and haven’t changed. Clarissa Vaughan, who was in love with and had an affair with a bisexual man, Richard, now lives with a woman in a stable relationship in Manhattan. Richard, who is dying of AIDS, is a poet/novelist who is about to receive a prestigious literary prize. Clarissa is planning a pre-award party for him, and a lot of her activity is based on buying the flowers for that party (cf. Mrs. Dalloway in the original novel).

Laura Brown shares an almost-kiss and a yearning with her neighbor Kitty in post-war suburban California, where she is driven almost to suicide by the stifling role of wife and mother. Most of her activity is centered on baking a cake for her husband’s birthday, throwing it away because it isn’t perfect, and baking another one. She steals a few hours from her suffocating existence and rents a hotel room where she can read Woolf’s novel undisturbed and preserve her sanity.

Virginia Woolf, as we know, was married to Leonard Woolf but had affairs with women, most notably Vita Sackville-West, and committed suicide in 1941. She is followed in the novel on a day in her life in 1923 when she begins to write Mrs. Dalloway, and attempts to maintain her sanity in the face of crippling headaches and the suffocatingly protective attitude of her husband.

What I most appreciate about The Hours is the subtlety and the sensitivity of the writing. Cunningham has achieved both simplicity and complexity in this book. He has connected the seemingly separate stories in unexpected and surprising ways as if he hadn’t intended them to be connected, but they just were, because the larger themes of living, loving and dying are inevitably connected and we can’t unconnect them. He does this by giving us glimpses of common (and by that I mean common to us all) activities and emotions.

She brushes her teeth, brushes her hair, and starts downstairs. She pauses several treads from the bottom, listening, waiting; she is again possessed (it seems to be getting worse) by a dream-like 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. What, she wonders, is wrong with her.

This could be any of the women in the book, or anyone reading the book, for that matter. Later, this same woman experiences a moment of “rightness” after things go well for her.

It does not seem impossible that she has undergone a subtle but profound transformation, here in this kitchen, in this most ordinary of moments: She has caught up with herself. She has worked so long, so hard, in such good faith, and now she’s gotten the knack of living happily, as herself, the way a child learns at a particular moment to balance on a two-wheel bicycle. It seems she will be fine. She will not lose hope.

Cunningham finds universality in the particular but doesn’t flaunt it in an epic way. The Hours is not a large book, not a grand book full of heroes and heroines. It rejoices in the simple details of life that give momentary satisfaction and make us want to keep going, to step into the next moment, and the one after that. Life is not about leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop. It’s about taking small steps and noticing things along the way.

This June, again, the trees along West Tenth Street have produced perfect little leaves from the squares of dog dirt and discarded wrappers in which they stand. Again the window box of the old woman next door, filled as it always is with faded red plastic geraniums pushed into the dirt, has sprouted a rogue dandelion.

What a thrill, what a shock, to be alive on a morning in June, prosperous, almost scandalously privileged, with a simple errand to run.

Another thing I like about Cunningham is he knows when he’s written enough. He knows when to end things and let the reader’s mind take over. He makes us feel complicit in the writing, as if he’s just putting into words what we’ve always thought and known. We are part of the creative act and he’s the medium through which everything is channeled.

We can live it, experience it, and feel it, but he’s the one who can put it into words. Cunningham connects us through the written word, which is what every aspiring writer wants to do, which is what Virginia Woolf is trying to do when she begins her new novel.

It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance, and when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty.


Cunningham, Michael. The Hours. Picador; Reissue edition (November 1, 2002) 240 pages. ISBN-10: 0312305060; ISBN-13: 978-0312305062

Views of Bangkok

Movie Review: Pan’s Labyrinth

I went to see Pan’s Labyrinth at the Lido cinema in Bangkok last week. The Lido is an older movie theater that’s small and comfortable, and usually shows “art” films or foreign films that you’ll never see in the many omniplex cinemas around the city. There are usually only about four or five English-language films (read, American blockbusters) being shown during any week in Bangkok, and they can each occupy three screens per theater, depending on the size of the theater.

Pan’s Labyrinth was written and directed by Mexican-born Guillermo del Toro, who also directed Hellboy, one of my favorite comic-book hero movies (thanks mainly to Ron Perlman, who turned Hellboy into a complex, funny guy).

The story of Pan’s Labyrinth takes place in Spain in 1944. According to the bit of history we get with the opening credits, in 1944 there were still guerilla fighters in the hills of Spain who were trying to defeat Franco’s Fascists. The action begins with a military convoy transporting a pregnant woman, Carmen, and her daughter Ofelia through the forest to an old mill that serves as a military base for soldiers who are hunting down the guerillas in a take-no-prisoners (except to torture them) war. The sadistic captain in charge of the operation is Carmen’s second husband and she is carrying his son. Captain Vidal is an obsessive and controlling perfectionist who wants his son to be born near him, and so he has Carmen brought to the mill. She is clearly not well and Vidal insists that she use a wheelchair at all times, even though she protests that it isn’t necessary.

Ofelia is Carmen’s daughter by her first husband, a tailor who was killed during the war. She is an avid reader of fairytales and is deeply immersed in the story of a princess who ran away from her home in the dark netherworld, seeking blue skies and sunshine. Her father, the king, has vowed to wait forever for her return. Ofelia’s narrative thread plunges us into a world of fantasy that runs parallel throughout the film to the brutal reality of the war being waged between the Fascist soldiers and the resistance fighters.

Ofelia accidentally comes upon an ancient labyrinth near the mill while chasing a locust, which, it turns out, is actually a fairy, sent from the magical world beneath the labyrinth. The fairy leads Ofelia to a faun that, as it turns out, only she can see. In order to find out whether she is the lost princess, the faun gives Ofelia three difficult tasks to perform, and tells her she must complete them successfully before the full moon. If she does, she will be returned to her real parents and live in the magical kingdom forever.

Del Toro skillfully intertwines the quest for the missing princess, the war between the army and the anti-Fascists, and the birth of Carmen’s baby, using a handful of characters that connect to each other in both worlds, each as labyrinthine and terrifying as the other. In the fantasy world that Ofelia must navigate all by herself, she must confront a huge, grotesque toad and a hideous creature that eats children. She will ultimately be forced to make a horrifying choice to determine whether or not she is the lost princess.


Del Toro handles the two stories brilliantly, and won a well-deserved Oscar for best foreign film at the Academy Awards this year. There are many heart-stopping moments in both stories and enough twists and turns (forgive the pun) to keep us guessing to the end. Is Ofelia really the lost princess? Will the baby be born alive? Will Carmen survive the birth? Will the rebel informer who lives and works in the mill be caught? Will the vicious and sadistic Captain Vidal get what he deserves? Maybe. Maybe not. And definitely not in the way we expect.

Despite the fact that the central character, Ofelia (wonderfully portrayed by 11-year-old Ivana Baquero), is a child, and despite the magic realism of the fairytale world she inhabits, this is not a film for children. There are images of brutality and acts of cruelty that stay in the mind; I covered my eyes a few times during the torture scenes and could not watch the Captain stitch up his own slashed face.

As a writer, I attempt to bring together the disparate elements of life through character and story. In the best of all possible worlds, this process is seamless and the reader makes discoveries, not because I’ve said, “Know this,” but because I’ve led him or her in the right direction. In Pan’s Labyrinth, del Toro has sometimes resorted to black-and-white, good-versus-evil storytelling. The characters tend to be representative and one-dimensional, making their actions predictable. But the artistry in this movie lies in bringing together two narratives from two very different worlds. The luxury of exploring multi-dimensional characters would have required more hours than a filmmaker is allowed and would, in all probability, have reduced the tension that makes this such an effective film.

A good film, in my opinion, is both experiential and thought provoking. But if you have too much time to think during the film, chances are the experience will be watered down. Better to be thinking about the film as you exit the theater; and even better if you’re still thinking about it a week later.