Customer Reviews

Mr. Dalloway: A Novella

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Mr. Dalloway deserves all the attention it is getting. Focusing on the husband of the protagonist of Virgina Wolff's Mrs. Dalloway, it fills in the gaps and makes for a wonderful story. Again, it covers only one day in the life but, oh, what a day. Mr. Lippincott writes with elegance (as always). His wonderful collection of short stories, The Real, True Angel, showed us what he could do -- and this novel doesn't let the reader down. It is a short, spare book which lingers in the mind for a long, intense time.

MR. DALLOWAY was truly a pleasure to read. The language is elegant and lucid, the characters engaging, and the story expertly, suspensefully, and wittily told. I savored every page!

MR. DALLOWAY is a triumphant exploration of time, love, omens, and selfhood--an elegant union of language and ideas. Throughout, the prose simply billows. Like most of D.H. Lawrence's work, the novella is savage but wondrous, exposing human nature and society with a seamless blend of evaluation and forgiveness. A lush, satisfying read!

This book was a nostalgic visit with an old friend who surprises one with a new twist. Wonderfully crafted and a pleasure to read. Mr. Lippincott has captured Virginia Woolf and made her his own.

There are few writers who can successfully pull into a compelling narrative a literary tradition, an historical personage, real-time events and circumstance. Mr. Lippincott in his audacious and lyrical show has masterfully brought to surface and to light the subtle and vascular connections between an intimate group of people. (An intimacy physical, emotional, mental, spiritual.) Like Frost's Silken Tent or Heloise's letters, an incomparable expression of the body of love. Read and enjoy.

Like Michael Cunningham's novel THE HOURS, this novel begins with an interesting premise. I think Mr. Lippincott is also right in saying that Woolf left Richard Dalloway's character in MRS. DALLOWAY deliberately vague. For these and other reasons, I very much hoped to admire this book. Unfortunately, Lippincott's novel is not a great success. Although most of the reviewers claim that his style is Woolfian and that Woolf would have loved his book, I really think she would have found the writing rather amateur and the psychological observations downright embarrassing. The author's handling of Richard's supposed love for his now-deceased brother is mawkish rather than moving; indeed, the author's push to explain all aspects and causes of Richard's desire gives us the very opposite of Woolf's fascination with the mystery of desire, gay or straight. Instead of her modernist enigmas, we have Lippincott's excessively repetitious pop-psychological explanations for all motives. The descriptions of London life also read as if they were written by a visitor lacking a sense of the city's history. So, I'm afraid the reviewer for KIRKUS gets exactly right the author's strangely insistent asides, his clumsy narrative perspectives, the novel's rather weak conception . . .

Clearly, other readers enjoyed this book more than I did. That's fine. But before we rush to embrace this book as Woolfian, perhaps we should pause and ask if the comparison is really accurate and just.

Lippincott's novella is a continuation of sorts of Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway", except from the point of view from Mr Dalloway. The event in this book is the couple's anniversary, which corresponds with a solar eclipse. The author skilfully explores the nature of love, and the nature of women and men. Richard Dalloway adores his wife Clarissa, but he also loves Robert Davies. The three paths converge and come to a sort of beautiful moment, framed by the eclipse. It may be not quite as evocative and potent as Cunningham's "The Hours" or Woolf's books, but this book is still exceptional and beautiful. A book to enjoy and revisit.

Mr. Dalloway exposes the protagonist in a delicate and subtle way, just as Mrs. Dalloway was exposed. We are privy to his most intimate thoughts, as well as to a secret about his life that not only makes sense but is something I believe Woolf would have developed had she been so inclined. The story line is original, fresh, yet echoes the Woolfian tone so well that it often made me feel as though Virginia had come back, reincarted in Lippincott's fingers, to add yet another chapter to her already magnificent body of work. I was not only impressed by Mr. Dalloway, but enthralled. The writing, the story, the other characters--all were solidly developed and superb. BRAVO!