![]() ![]() ![]() Cunningham's insightful use of the historical record concerning Woolf in her household outside London in the 1920s is matched by his audacious imagining of her inner lifeand his equally impressive plunges into the lives of Laura and Clarissa. Dalloway,"" which is set in 1990s Greenwich Village and concerns Clarissa Vaughan's preparations for a party for her gay-and dying-friend, Richard, who has nicknamed her Mrs. Brown,"" about one Laura Brown's efforts to escape, somehow, an airless marriage in California in 1949 while, coincidentally, reading Mrs. Woolf,"" about Virginia's own struggle to find an opening for Mrs. ![]() In alternating chapters, the three stories unfold: ""Mrs. This book more than fulfills the promise of Cunningham's 1990 debut, A Home at the End of the World, while showing that sweep does not necessarily require the sprawl of his second book, Flesh and Blood. She has left a note for Leonard, and another for Vanessa.""), the reader becomes completely entranced. But as soon as one dips into Cunningham's prologue, in which Woolf's suicide is rendered with a precise yet harrowing matter-of-factness (""She hurries from the house, wearing a coat too heavy for the weather. At first blush, the structural and thematic conceits of this novel-three interwoven novellas in varying degrees connected to Virginia Woolf-seem like the stuff of a graduate student's pipe dream: a great idea in the dorm room that betrays a lack of originality. ![]()
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