The Hours

The Hours is the 1998 Michael Cunningham novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1999 and the PEN/Faulkner the same year, and it is the book I press into the hands of anyone who claims contemporary American literary fiction cannot match the modernist tradition it grew out of. Cunningham takes Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as both subject and structural template, and writes three interwoven days: Virginia Woolf in 1923 Richmond beginning to write Mrs Dalloway; Laura Brown in 1949 Los Angeles reading the finished novel while baking a birthday cake for her husband; Clarissa Vaughan in late-1990s New York throwing a party for her dying friend.

Cunningham's strength in The Hours is the formal precision. The book is structurally elegant in the way only the strongest novels are. Each of the three women is doing a particular kind of work (artistic, domestic, social) under a particular kind of pressure (mental illness, marital depression, AIDS-era grief), and the parallels between the three days build the kind of accumulated emotional weight that the best literary fiction can achieve. Fans of Woolf herself, of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, or of Toni Morrison's Beloved will recognize the careful modernist craftsmanship.

The 2002 Stephen Daldry film adaptation is excellent. The book is better.

Five stars. The Hours Michael Cunningham novel is essential American literary fiction of its decade. Recommended without reservation. Readers new to Cunningham should start here; the rest of his work (Specimen Days, A Home at the End of the World) rewards reading after this novel.