The Hours, Michael Cunningham (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY, 1998) ***

Highly praised in Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, this novel went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The novel follows the lives of three women in three different times and locales. One woman is Virginia Woolf in England in the 1920's when she gets the idea which inspires her to begin writing Mrs. Dalloway; another woman is Clarissa Vaughn, a modern day version of the Clarissa in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in New York City at the end of the 20th Century; and the third woman is Laura Brown, a woman facing a life crisis, in Los Angeles in 1949.

The book begins with a chilling reenactment of Virginia Woolf's suicide, imagining her thoughts and actions during her final day. The following chapters alternate from one woman to the other but there is a continuity within the three stories, which somewhat converge at the book's end. Clarissa Vaughn's chapters parallel those of Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway. As in Woolf's book, the entire story takes place in a single day. She is giving a party for her oldest love, a poet dying of AIDS.

Laura Brown is pregnant, has just had a terrible experience trying unsuccessfully to bake a cake for her husband, feels like a failure, is reading Virginia Woolf and even contemplating suicide. She rents a room (A room of one's own?) to continue reading Woolf. Her story, too, takes place in a single day.

If all of this sounds dark and gruesome, it really isn't. These are women facing what they consider very serious decisions, and dealing with them in their own ways. It is a very different sort of read, no single, simple plot but instead a parallel course of events that are connected. I'd certainly recommend reading Mrs. Dalloway first, but it's not essential; The Hours is enjoyable in its own right.