Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1925.

Where do Virginia Woolf’s novels happen? I suppose they take place in England, sure, but thinking back, a day later, on this book I can’t quite connect the wheres of the novel into a design. A wise writer once told me that if poems are built line by line, novels are built scene by scene. (This isn’t the mot that made her wise, okay? but just trust me.) And while I can think of scenes in the novel—the party scene, the scene where Richard delivers flowers, the death scene—the whole word scene feels like a slur against them. They don’t demarcate themselves as such. We move from scene to scene not as if taken from one and delivered to the other. It’s like we keep falling, like Alice in her rabbithole, or Sarah in her scary tube of Helping Hands, forced to grasp onto what we think we know about reading fiction.

Woolf’s novels, maybe, happen in a small pouch of space directly behind the eyeballs of her characters.

Boastingly, I read this novel, which comprises a day, morning to night, in a day. No it’s not that long, but still, it’s Virginia Woolf. At any rate, I think To the Lighthouse is a finer book. Or, at least, I imagine it’ll stay longer with me, if only for the suddenness of its middle.