Average Rating: 
Rating:  - too contrived
I thought this book did a disservice to Virginia Woolfe by transposing her brilliant and poignant novel (Mrs. Dalloway) onto a modern day plot. Substituting character names, locations, and various major and minor sub-texts (AIDS in place of post-war trauma; a movie star in place of a queen) does not create an original novel (or even a thought-provoking sequel). I don't think you can "cover" literature in the same way you can cover a song.The other two sections of the book, which dealt with the 50's housewife who read Mrs. Dalloway, and the fictional account of V. Woolfe writing the novel, were much more enjoyable and well done.
Rating:  - Overrated and boring
I finally finished reading this book after putting in down at least a dozen times. I finished it only because of the overwhelming hype surrounding it, aided by its brevity. Dull, dull, dull. I haven't seen the movie, but the previews for it look quite interesting. I would love to have been the screenwriter for the movie. I would have been able to flesh out and develop the characters in ways the author does not. From what little I've seen of the movie trailers, they have done just that. I kept at it, hoping something would happen. Here's a clue... almost nothing does. Oh, and there's no grand message either. The written story is dull and depressing; the movie previews appear to have more vitality. My recommendation would be to see the movie.
Rating: - Admirable intentions, but part of the book is too derivative
Michael Cunningham's THE HOURS has been much adored as an homage to Virginia Wolf's MRS. DALLOWAY. The novel, of course, tells three interlocking stories, after first beginning with the narrative of Woolf's suicide in 1941. It tells of Woolf's attempts at starting the novel in 1923, while in enforced isolation with her husband at Hogarth House in Richmond; of Laura Brown, a post-war Los Angeles suburban housewife's unravelling on a day when she read the novel for the first time; and of "Clarissa Vaughn," a contemporary woman much like Clarissa Dalloway herself who prepares a party to honor her dearest friend who is dying of AIDS on the day he is to win a major literary award.The first and second strands of Cunningham's novel are lovely. Cunningham admirably brings something new to our conception of Virginia Woolf and her complicated relations with her sister, husband and servants. His second strand, "Mrs. Brown" (a tribute, of course, to Woolf's famous essay "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" and its conception of what 20th-century authors owe to their characters), is the most beautiful and original section of the book: Laura Brown does seem to carry out luminously Woolf's exhortation for contemporary authors to represent faithfully the inner life. But it is in the third strand, the contemporary story, that the book doesn't come off at all. rather than as a postmodern homage, the section reads as a simultaneously bad and derivative imitative of MRS. DALLOWAY: I found myself cringing in these sections at Cunningham's weak imitations of Woolf's plot and prose. Despite its ingenious and noble intentions, this sequence prevents the novel, in the end, from fully deserving the praise it has garnered.
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