The Hours

Michael Cunningham

The Pulitzer? Cunningham was ignored for Flesh and Blood, and got the Pulitzer for this? There's only one explanation, and that's the the Pulitzer committe (which, it was recently pointed out, is made up of journalists) completely forgot the opening hundred seventy-five pages in the process of being stunned by the last fifty.

Publisher's Weekly, in its review of The Hours, castigates Cunningham in a minor way for the scope of Flesh and Blood, and compares The Hours favoriably to that novel because The Hours is a little less than half as long. I can't argue with PW's assertion that The Hours shows that Cunningham can write a shorter novel that has the same power as Flesh and Blood did, but I can, and do, take issue with the inference that Flesh and Blood is a lesser book because of it. Where Flesh and Blood stayed in one general time frame and focused on one excellently-drawn extended family, The Hours cuts back and forth, paralleling the lives of Virginia Woolf in England, a fan of Virginia Woolf's who's in the process of reading Mrs. Dalloway, and the fan's son, who grows up to be an award-winning poet suffering from complications resulting from AIDS.

When Cunningham focuses on his fictional creations, things are all well and good. The Hours contains many of the things that made Flesh and Blood a great novel-- Cunningham's powerful style of narrative, his willingness to go more deeply into the emotions of characters than most writers, an ability to pace his book that's unmatched in modern literature. Ironically, it's when Cunningham focuses on Virginia Woolf and her family that the characters stop being realistic. There's just not enough of them, and Cunningham's hero-worship of Woolf is too obvious. The end result is a novel inconsistent at best.

When it's on its game, though, The Hours is a rollercoaster of a novel. The last fifty pages, especially, will be read at one clip, as Cunningham ties in the stories of the mother and son, and the grandiose prose used in the last few sections of the novel is more than deserved. This is a novel capable of bringing tears in its last pages. If the rest of the book had been firing on that many cylinders, it would have been a Pulitzer no-brainer, but as it stands, in the bulky shadow of its superior predecessor, one wonders if the committee weren't trying to right the mistake it had made in ignoring Flesh and Blood three years previous.