Mr. Dalloway: A Novella

by Robin Lippincott

A virtuoso performance of postmodern daring, Mr. Dalloway offers a rich augmentation of Virginia Woolf's classic novel. It is June 29, 1927ÑRichard and Clarissa Dalloway's thirtieth anniversary and also a day of historical significance. Richard has arranged a surprise party for his wife. As he leaves their house in Westminster to buy flowers for the party, his thoughts turn to Robert Davies (Robbie), a young editor at Faber with whom he has been having an affair off and on for many years. Because of Richard's efforts to contain their relationship, Robbie has exposed their affair in a letter to Clarissa, who tells her husband that she "understands" And today Richard, despite his misgivings, finds himself on his way to Robbie's house-only to be shaken by the discovery that Robbie is not there. As does the Woolf novel, Mr. Dalloway takes place within a single day, unfolding prismatically with a simultaneity of Clarissa walks in London and remembers her courtship with Richard; their daughter Elizabeth searches for answers about her eccentric history tutor's somewhat mysterious and premature death; and a determined and drunken Robert Davies has decided to crash Richard's party, dressed all in white satin, no less! As the novella moves toward its surprising climax, it revisits several of Woolf's celebrated characters-Sally Seton (now Lady Rosseter), Hugh Whitbread, Lady Bruton-while introducing new ones, such as the Sapphist couple Katherine Truelock and Eleanor Gibson, and the strange and beautiful Sasha Richardson. Imaginative and formally bold as it refracts Woolf's fiction to invent a story completely Lippincott's own, Mr. Dalloway rides forward on waves of a masterfully complex and musical prose, full of wit, linguistic verve, and startling imagery. Robin Lippincott is the author of The Real, True Angel , a collection of short stories published in 1996 by Fleur-de-Lis Press. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The American Voice, The Literary Review, Provincetown Arts , and many other magazines; he was awarded fellowships to Yaddo in 1997 and 1998. Born and raised in the South, he has lived in Boston for twenty years. He is curren

Genres: Fiction, Gay, LGBT, Literary Fiction, British Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Robin’s latest book is BLUE TERRITORY: A MEDITATION ON THE LIFE AND ART OF JOAN MITCHELL. His collaboration with Julia Watts, RUFUS + SYD, a novel for young adults, will be published in spring 2016. Robin is also the author of the novels IN THE MEANTIME, OUR ARCADIA, and MR. DALLOWAY, as well as the short story collection, THE ‘I’ REJECTED. Robin’s fiction has received nominations for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the American Library Association Roundtable Award, the Independent Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. For ten years he reviewed mostly art and photography books for "The New York Times Book Review." His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in over thirty journals, including "The Paris Review," "Fence," "Bloom," "American Short Fiction," "Memorious," "The Literary Review," "Provincetown Arts," "The Louisville Review," and "The Bloomsbury Review," and his fiction has been anthologized in M2M: NEW LITERARY FICTION, REBEL YELL, and REBEL YELL 2. He has held many fellowships at Yaddo, as well as a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Though born and raised in the south, he has lived in the Boston area for many years. He teaches in the low residency MFA Program at Spalding University.

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 1 out of 5]

I just wrote a review of this novel - a very long one - but the computer failed so it is lost - which may be no bad thing as it was very long and detailed, possibly too much so, but I do not have the patience to reconstruct it.

To begin, the novel is well written and I have no criticism with his homage/pastiche of Virginia Woolf but I have not read 'Mrs. Dalloway' so I take on trust the assurances of his skills in ventriloquism as he uses her style/format to construct a new story, this one based around her husband.

Unfortunately however skilled his 'Virginia Woolf' impersonation may be in literary term he has totally failed to create a believable 1920s London novel in either terms of historical detail or characterization. Everything about the way the characters talk, act, think, behave is all wrong - glaringly so. The setting is even worse, not only are the details of the journeys characters take around London streets wrong, but the train journey at the end is wrong in the physical details of the train and its carriages and the length of time the journey takes.

But to concentrate on substantial idiocies Mr. Dalloway is a 55 year old man who has recently been involved with 45 year old man Robbie Davies. Neither in the 1920s nor now-a-days would this age difference be significant. It might be when they were 15 and 25 or 25 and 35 but in this novel they are both middle aged (please see my footnote *1 below). Robbie Davies would not have thought of himself, or behaved like a 'young man' it is out of character and out of period. There is no way a 45 year old man in 1920s London would have dressed up in a white tailcoat and top hat - it is pretty grotesque to think of him owning one. His appearance at a party dressed like that would have attracted derision and lead to him being thought drunk or mad.

The entire context for their relationship seems to be based on the example of EM Forster who managed to, reach his late thirties without any real sexual experience either at school, university or later, all due to the fear of the Oscar Wilde trials. Whatever the case of Forster there is ample evidence that Wilde's case had very little long term affect in terms of limiting or restricting gay/queer/homosexual behavior and London in the 1920s which was rife with very open and obvious gay cruising grounds. That these two men had reached such 'elderly'ages, for the time, without any history of sexual activity is improbable.

Mr. Lippincott includes so many howlers in terms of behavior, with regards to servants as to suggest he has never seen any UK films or TV series. His also suggests that as a boy Mr. Dalloway went for early morning walks every day before going to school (I won't spoil the significance of this by revealing its context) presumably on the school bus to the local high school? He would have been at boarding school, there were no local schools for middle class boys to go to. When we get to the party which climax's this novel he has it held on a train going to Yorkshire but again it appears he has never watched any British TV or films which would have shown him that British trains in the 1920s, and long afterwards, were not open plan with seats (awkward as that might have been for a party) but compartments.

I was going to point out more absurdities and anachronisms but I won't, I ask you to just accept that every detail about this novels setting is wrong. I am not a particularly obsessive person when it comes to historical details, but if you are setting a novel in a particular time and place, particularly if it supposed to take place two years after its original then you need to be accurate and truthful to the period in atmosphere otherwise you keep thinking this is wrong and as the 'wrongs' pile up they distract from the story. For example we are told that one of Mrs. Dalloway's 'duchesses' (this would be a character based on or taken from the original Mrs. Dalloway) was born a few years after Victoria ascended the throne - which would have made her 86, positive ancient for the time and even very elderly for today, and utterly out of context for when she appears. If I am forced to spend time wondering about her age and hunting down the date of Victoria coming to the throne then I am not paying attention to the story. That is why ridiculously wrong details matter. The distractions of so many errors and improbabilities distracted me from enjoying and following this novel. That none of the mainstream press reviewers spotted the vast egregious nonsense in Mr. Lippincott's book makes me doubt if any of them actually read it.

One definite result of this farrago of Woolfian pastiche is that I have postponed for some considerable time my plans (always very uncertain) to read that other novel based on Woolf - Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours' unless someone can promise me that it is worth the effort.

*1 The next time such an age difference would come into play would be when they were 65 and 75 and the older man dies - a situation which I have recently become all to familiar.

[El · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having read this immediately after finishing the original story, Mrs. Dalloway, I think it might be fair to say that I might have been on a bit of Dalloway-overkill. This is essentially the same story as the Virginia Woolf book, but told from the point of view of Mr. Dalloway. It's like what Margaret Atwood did with The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus.

I felt Lippincott did a pretty decent job with the Woolf story. He did his best to maintain a similar writing style, but Woolf's style came from within her based on her experiences and what was happening in the world, so for this Joe Blow to come along and accomplish the same thing would be asking a bit much. But he does a respectable job, even if there were a few too many parenthetical remarks (and I do like me some parenthetical remarks).

My biggest beef with the book is probably what a lot of Woolf fans will love: Lippincott includes Virginia Woolf as an actual character. Mr. Dalloway tosses around the idea of buying Woolf's latest book for his wife. And sure, I know he's paying homage to Ms. Woolf and all, so whatever - kudos for that. But I sort of hated it. It felt a little gimmicky.

As someone who can respect Virginia Woolf (and admittedly has not had that much experience yet to make a true decision of her writing), I thought this rates about the same as I felt about the original book. I imagine a true Woolfian will feel differently. But, eh. It was nice to read the story from another's perspective. I just wish Woolf had had an opportunity to do it herself.

[Jeffrey Richards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent little "sequel" to Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf. Lippencott sets his novella about two years after the "events" that occurred in Mrs. Dalloway and, even though the story does move from narrator to narrator (Mr. Richard Dalloway; Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway; Elizabeth Dalloway, their daughter; and Robert Davis), the main focus of the novel is Mr. Richard Dalloway, as evident by the title. Lippincott recreates the famous stream-of-consciousness format of the original novel but, for some reason, it doesn't feel nearly as tedious as it did in Mrs. Dalloway (a book I've never been fond of). Maybe because the story of Richard Dalloway interested me more, given that Lippencott gives him a secret, homosexual life and is therefore able to explore another facet of the London we didn't see in Mrs. Dalloway. More seems to happen in this novel, as well, even though the premise is basically the same as with Mrs. Dalloway: the preparations for and then execution of a "party", this time The Dalloway's 30th anniversary. Still, you learn quite a bit about their lives before they became The Dalloways and quite a bit about their lives together, including their secrets and half-lies they've told each other and themselves. At only 215 pages, the novella moves fairly quickly, despite the tedium of their ruminations on the past (especially Clarrissa and her never-ending pining for the truncated relationship with Peter Walsh).

All in all, I enjoyed this novella very much; it was sort of a palette-cleanser between denser reads, which sometimes one needs.

[Brian Carney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating second look at the people and events of Mrs. Dalloway.

[Ellen Lipscomb · Rating 1 out of 5]

Adding to some else work

I found it lacking. Conversations about a ghost and a ghost of a life. Not my cup of tea. Maybe I don’t care for copying from some ones work.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

No stretch. Virginia Woolfe taught me to write. Well, I'm no endorsement for her pedagogical powers, many serve as living proof of her abilities. Woolfe, whether through personal/critical essay or fiction, subtly blends crisp phrasing, intellectual study, and moving development. I can think of no writer more iconic nor deserving of praise for her linguistic use in the Twentieth Century.

On racks of new fiction and employee recommendations at bookstores, I find an increasing number of works that build directly from classic novels and such. "Mrs. Dalloway" will, of course, stand as Woolfe's contribution to the cannon of English Literature. Poignant, in no small part, for its haunting parallels to the author's personal biography. Although, I'll take "To The Lighthouse" or "Orlando," both are superior as novels. In the end, "A Room of One's Own," is her masterpiece. But, "Mrs. Dalloway" is extraordinary in its own right.

In "Mr. Dalloway," Robin Lippcott does an admirable job of mirroring Wolfe's language. He finds ways to reinterpret the self-fulfilling sadness of the original effort. However, I fear Lippcott's update resonates for the wrong reasons.

Coming at the story from the male perspective serves as a comment on Woolfe's place as a supreme Feminist icon. That, she is. Woolfe lent her voice to advance female artists. But, her work was not political per se. Woolfe's eloquence eminated not from her political persuasiveness but from her style and descriptive powers, not to mention character development.

While notable and a solid effort, I think "Mr. Dalloway" is more a curiosity piece. The prose is solid, the story is interesting. In the end, I fear the book may inadvertantly cheapen the legacy of one of the greats.

[Yancey Gulley · Rating 4 out of 5]

corey found this for me in a used bookstore in Portland. it is an interesting take on the life of the man who shared a home and love with clarissa. what is in his mind? who does he secretly love and loath? where does he go on his walks? and what famous american ends up interwoven with this couple?

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I kept feeling this one must be some sort of parody, or else the lower upper class of that time lead incredibly vacuous lives. At the party (second part of the story), names are thrown out like a pitching machine gone amok, with point-of-view changing every couple of paragraphs with no warning!

I read Woolf's book years ago, recalling no details, so can't compare this one with that.

[Mary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't put down Woolf without treating yourself to Lippincott. My friend and hero. These books should be shelved side by side.

[Sarabande Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finalist for the 2000 Lambda Literary Award in Fiction

[Joneill1225 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting re-do of Woolf's novel

[April · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spare and lovely and very much in keeping with Mrs. Dalloway (obviously).

[Erin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, the second half is better than the first in that Lippincott has some original material to work with. But lordy, I found this book tiresome--particularly the almost meeting of Virginia Woolf.