Michael Cunningham skillfully intertwines the interior lives of three women: Virginia Woolf, shortly before her depression-induced suicide, Clarissa, whom her gay erstwhile boyfriend calls “Mrs. Dalloway,” and Laura, depressed enough with her life as a wife and mother to seriously consider suicide.
Clarissa’s friend Richard, crippled with AIDS, in fact slips out of a fifth story window. She recalls the moment of his first youthful kiss as the happiest of her lesbian life. Virginia Woolf, developing the character Mrs. Dalloway, decides she will recognize the first kiss of her lesbian lover as the happiest moment of her life.
All three spend a great deal of time trying to live in the moment, to seize the present and call it happiness, with only momentary success. So the hours slip by.
These characters and their families are brought to life in elegantly simple prose. But the overall mood is not one of joie de vivre.
Elaine says she recalls this as a fine, serious novel verging on the somber that she is glad to have read but doesn’t want to read again. A good movie, which has been shown at RiverWoods, was made of it.
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