Years of writer's workshops have led me to develop an allergy to narrative structure. It's the only aspect of the craft that can be abstracted into a useful formula, so that formula tends to get applied to death. The result is that much of the fiction out there is a threadbare tapestry of ill-defined characters, uncertain voice, and platitudinous insight –  draped over a swaggering, self-assured structure.

The Hours is a contrivance of not one, but three structures. The novel weaves together the stories of three women, each plotline following a classic Freytag triangle. The women live in different periods of history; the action takes place in a single day of each woman's life;  the stories ultimately unite under a dramatic event which brings a common significance to all three  –  all these grad-school structural devices ought to have produced an unwieldy and mind-blowingly boring book. (Not to mention: one of Michael Cunningham's three protagonists is Virginia Woolf herself.  Yeah, this is a writer with BIG balls.)

And miraculously, he succeeds. The structure is such a big presence that it should have its own name in the credits, yet somehow it manages never to interfere with Cunningham's elegant, intelligent storytelling.