When you read a book like The Hours, you have to decide whether you want to see it as a work in its own right or as an illumination of something else. In this case, The Hours can either be seen as a standalone novel telling the parallel stories of three women in three time periods or as a complementary text to Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway. I struggled with The Hours. (Full disclosure: I struggled with it mostly because I heard Michael Cunningham speak at a screening, and he was an arrogant, pompous snob. So I didnt want to like The Hours. Or be impressed by it.)Unfortunately, I do rather like it, and I was impressed by parts of it. But I wasnt smittenand I dont think its completely due to a grudge. And truly, the Pulitzer committee must have had a dearth of options in 1999. (I just looked it up. By my measure, they did.)At its core, the novel plumbs the quiet desperation of three women. They struggle with finding a purpose, with their sexuality, with building a healthy home, and moreand their insecurities rise and fall as their hopes and dreams clash with the humdrum of every day successes and failures. Cunningham tells their stories with a great deal of empathy. He lets us into their minds and reveals to us the kinds of doubts and self-examination that haunt all of us, and he does so with some sensitivity.And yet, many elements of The Hours feel cliché to me: the plot turns, the characters desperation, the coincidental interactions. They feel calculated more than they feel human, designed for the purpose of packing an emotional punch. The characters sometimes even seem to slipcaricature-likebeyond sentimentality and into saccharine. Made into a movie (I havent seen it), I imagine it would fit nicely in between soaps.And yet, and yet, as I asked myself whether I would teach this, I had to acknowledge that it is ripe for discussion. What is the range of the characters emotions? Where do they come from? How do Cunninghams descriptive bursts set up the characters self-doubt? Why tell the story of Clarissa and Lauren and not of Richard? Students can dig in, if not to the story and to the prose, then to the space opened up between or within them.Finally, the text did raise a recurring question for me: how do novels with third-person omniscient narrators resolve the issue of voice? Here, as in other similar novels, the voice changes as it narrates the lives of different characters. It slips in and out of the characters voices without declaring so. With one character, the prose is spangled with almost and sort of, seeming to reflect the characters wispiness, while with another, the sentences are short and clipped. This seems wildly undisciplined, or at least inconsistent, to me. Do I recommend it? Mmk. (sigh)Would I teach it? If I were desperate. It would sustain it.Partnered texts: Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia WoolfLasting impression: Cunninghams stories build small buildings out of blocks on our living room floor. He labels them with the names of a few buildings weve seen before, and draws some nice pictures on some others. We look at the result and remark to each other about how nicely they reflect what we know and want to think. Its pretty neat what he did.

I gave the novel one star simply because Goodreads wouldn't let me give it zero! The book is about three self-absorbed, whiny and spoiled women, all from different eras, complaining and whining about their lives, even though, they essentially have it all (wealth, love, family, friends, etc). The book is vile. The characters are repulsive and the plot is tiresome. I keep asking myself how on earth did this novel win a Pulitzer Prize? There's a huge red sticker on the front of the cover, of the novel, proudly advertising this fact -- it won the prize for fiction in 1999. Are the people that judge these things on crack?

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I read this book because Oprah told me to.Actually Oprah, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman told me to.It must have been a Thursday or Friday afternoon because those were the days off the last time I had a job for which I worked weekends.The episode with these three ladies was a little unconventional for Oprah. Rather than conducting an interview from her usual studio, she met them for tea in a fancy hotel. And it didn't so much seem like an interview as four women sitting down to tea and talking about their lives and careers and this movie which three of them had just done together.I'm not a big Oprah devotee, so I am quite sure that I have not seen enough episodes to warrant making such a statement, but it was one of her best episodes. These weren't huge Hollywood movie stars. Well, of course they were, but that is not how they were portrayed. They were women with families and careers and lives. There was no sensationalism. There was no gossip. there was no scandal or controversy. It was just tea.Afterwards, I got picked up my keys and immediately drove to the bookstore and purchased a copy of The Hours by Michael Cunningham. I hadn't seen the movie. I still haven't seen the movie. I have no interest in the movie. But the book is positively sublime.The way that the author braids together the threads of the lives of his three characters is subtle and deft. Maybe everyone else saw the conclusion coming, but I did not. When I reached it, however, it didn't deliver a shock or a surprise but a feeling that everything connected exactly as it should.