I felt pretty ambivalent about The Hours.  On the one hand, I related to a lot of the little bits and pieces of the very female lives depicted.  On the other, I found some of the writing and conceit to run on the prosaic and mundane side.  The intertwining of these lives seemed ambitious, and I felt Cunningham didn’t exactly pull it off.  Including Virginia Woolf seemed arbitrary and enlarged the scope of the book so much.  I would have liked more fictionalized Virginia.  Her character seemed almost careless when the other two women were connected so deeply, and Laura’s reading a Woolf novel seemed too tenuous a thread to connect all three women.  And the three women seemed to beg to be connected.

Posted at 5:44pm and tagged with: Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize winners, The Hours, lit, one column,.