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Counting The Hours

© Sarah White

Now, I'm pretty sure people are going to complain that this doesn't really fall into the spectrum of "Classic American Literature." How can something be a classic when it's not even five years old?

But I've always thought this topic was more about sharing really good books with people than worrying about definitions. Most people would say only books of a certain age can be called classics, but I beg to differ, and say that "The Hours" by Michael Cunningham is what I would classify as a true instant classic, and not in the way that booksellers would use the term. This is really a book I think everyone should read. Now.

This book is so brilliant it is almost disturbing. As a writer, as a person who loves the way words are put together, there is no way not to love this book. It is beautiful, haunting, horrible and oddly uplifting all at once.

In telling the intertwined tales of three women, this book tells the story of all women, of all people who love and are confused by life and afraid of death and want more of everything.

Here is a day in the lives of Virginia Woolf -- recuperating in the London suburbs with her husband, full of the hope and promise of a new novel she's writing, "Mrs. Dalloway" -- Mrs. Brown -- a 1950s housewife who suddenly finds herself unhappy with the prospect of living the perfect life and being all that everyone expects her to be and nothing more (who is, by the way, reading "Mrs. Dalloway") -- and Clarissa -- nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by her lifelong friend Richard, who is dying of AIDS and is about to be honored with a prestigious literary award for his poetry (he also wrote a novel about Clarissa, who is preparing a party for him on this day).

There are a lot of secrets held by these women: the wish to run away, to kill oneself, to go back and spend a lifetime with a gay man instead of as a "married" lesbian. They are haunted by love expressed in kisses -- Virginia Woolf and her sister in the kitchen behind the cook's back; Mrs. Brown and her neighbor who might have ovarian cancer, in the kitchen in front of her son; and Richard and Clarissa, when they were young, before they were in love, beside a lake, which Clarissa now believes was the one true pure moment of love in her life.

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