What’s shocking about this book is that it was written by a man. How, just how does Michael Cunningham get woman so profoundly right? The Hours gives us three different women in three different eras. One of them is Virginia Woolf. All three women are dealing with a profound sense of loss and longing. As Jack Nicholson’s character says in the fairly awful film The Witches of Eastwick “A woman is a hole, isn’t that what they say? All the futility of the world pouring into her.” Cunningham demonstrates this in a much more moving way, but the sentiment is the same. These women suffer in ways which go largely unacknowledged as they move about in their world. They are like icebergs; only one per cent of who they are shows above the surface. And yet they go on, they move forward, they keep their heads up, they fight their secret battles and try not to damage those around them. Cunningham takes us so far into their lives it is difficult to pull yourself back into reality at the end. What a writer. What a book.
