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pale_browneye 's review for:
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
The Hours manages to do something that many other novels with shifting perspectives cannot, it is developing fully realized characters. The story follows the life of three women, in three different decades, and how ‘Mrs Dalloway’ connects them. On the surface level this seems like a traditional literary fiction title, daring to be something different. But The Hours is really something different. As I have stated the best part of this novel roots from it’s deep characterization. Their innermost thoughts work well because of the third person omniscient narrator. We don’t really hear their true inner voices but through the narrator we get a glimpse inside of them. This novel probably has the most highlighted parts in my entire collection. The prose moves softly, it is gentle with short and long sentences in a single paragraph. The steam of conciousness style here does not feel forced, instead it feels like it is rooted from our conflicted women, Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughn. They are women who struggle to conform with society’s perspective of what a woman should be. Michael Cunnigham manages to express this problem through the three main characters who struggle in their own different ways. In the end, The Hours is a novel that will be remembered for it’s three main characters and prose.