Books: A modern Clarissa plans a party

The Hours

by Michael Cunningham Fourth Estate pounds 12.99

It is 1923, and at Hogarth House in Richmond, Surrey, Virginia Woolf is struggling with the early drafts of her latest book, "", which will eventually be published as her fourth novel under the title Mrs Dalloway. She baulks at the restrictions on her freedom imposed by the guardianship of her husband Leonard, ever watchful of her health since her most recent breakdown; and she longs to desert the boredom and isolation of suburbia for the "unexplored land" of the City. This scenario supplies one strand in the narrative of Michael Cunningham's intricate new novel, .

With Mrs Dalloway (1925) Woolf attempted to break with the novel of plot or action and replace it with a modernist fiction dependent on stream of consciousness and interior monologue. Influenced by Proust, whose A la recherche she was reading as she began writing, and by the much less well known sequence of novels known collectively as Pilgrimage, by their contemporary Dorothy Richardson, in which the elasticity of the "woman's sentence" is able to encapsulate even the most evanescent of memories or sensations, Woolf produced the novel which may be called the first of her maturity.

The action of Mrs Dalloway is confined to the events of one day - 13 June 1923 - on which Clarissa Dalloway, the middle-aged wife of a Conservative politician, is to give a party at her London home. That at least is its ostensible subject matter, but the novel is really concerned with elements of an inner life that are altogether more difficult to define: the appreciation of individual "moments of being", for instance, or the choices which propel one's life in a certain direction, or the heavy shadow cast by the burden of memory.

is a richly patterned tapestry, simultaneously a homage to Woolf's life and death, and to posterity's reading of her work, a subtle commentary on the relationship between life and creativity, as well as a moving tripartite fiction which looks at the after-life of Mrs Dalloway and its effects on two subsequent readers in the Los Angeles of the 1940s, and the New York City of today. In common with its progenitor, the interlinking plot-lines of Cunningham's book all take place within the confines of a single day, only this time it is three single days in the lives of three separate women. The first is Virginia Woolf herself, attempting to find a balance of mind, of sanity and insanity, in which to commit her imaginative responses to paper; the second is Laura Brown, a Los Angeles housewife and mother, who painstakingly bakes a cake for her husband's birthday while longing all the while to escape from the constraints of domesticity; finally there is Clarissa Vaughan, a New York publisher and editor, nicknamed Mrs Dalloway by her old friend Richard, an award-winning poet, dying from AIDS, in whose honour Clarissa plans a party.

is little more than 200 pages long, and one can't help marvelling at the economy of Cunningham's prose which allows the development and suggestion of so many pertinent themes. The book is like an echo-chamber in which references from the original Mrs Dalloway connect with the latterday stories and then seem to take on a life of their own (and because of this the novel's appeal may be narrowly limited to Woolfians; in that sense can't be said to have a life of its own).

Cunningham is the master of the leitmotif, and the kiss planted on Virginia Woolf's lips by her sister Vanessa Bell becomes the inspiration for the excited embrace from her friend Sally which Mrs Dalloway recalls experiencing as a young woman, and which is in turn reflected in Laura Brown's intimacy with her neighbour Kitty in the middle sections of the novel. Only occasionally does Cunningham falter and his art of suggestion creep too close to the formulaic. We know that Clarissa's friend Richard, the AIDS sufferer, is meant to parallel in some ways the character of Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked victim of the First World War from Mrs Dalloway, but was it really necessary to have Richard jump from the ledge of an open window in clumsy imitation of Septimus's suicide?

Cunningham cleverly captures the freedom of association in the minds of his characters in a way that is strikingly reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's own experimentation. His greatest stumbling-block, though, is his failure to convey the fragility and delicacy of Woolf's creative impulse. In comparison with Woolf's diary, her great, unequalled record of life as a creative artist, Cunningham's scenes of Woolf the writer-at-work have a surprisingly plodding and unconvincing air about them. But this fault doesn't mar his overall achievement. Virginia Woolf wrote that the process of writing Mrs Dalloway was like "tunnelling", digging out "beautiful caves" behind her characters. "The ideal," she explained, "is that the caves shall connect." And in Cunningham's final pages, in an elegant act of compression, he succeeds beautifully in bringing his three stories together.