If This Weren't Virginia Woolf It'd Be Easier

When you read the back cover or a plot summary of Mrs. Dalloway, it seems straightforward. Okay, you might say to yourself, this will be a book about a woman named Mrs. Dalloway and she's basically just going to sit around for the hundred and fifty pages and complain about her life decisions. Simple enough?
The thing is, this is Virginia Woolf.

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We're following a series of characters through their Saturdays, in preparation for a dinner party that night, hosted by Clarissa Dalloway. They are revealing their motivations and regrets, complications and successes, all while, in some indirect way, interacting with Mrs. Dalloway. While the title character obviously has the most time dedicated to her development as a character, the supporting characters are cumulatively extremely significant.
The thing that makes Mrs. Dalloway both challenging and brilliant is the "stream of consciousness" style and the way Woolf jumps from one character to another. There are no chapters in the novella and minimal paragraph breaks. One characters narrative will end and another's will begin with practically no transition. This causes a fluidity between the characters' narratives that foreshadows their  converging at the dinner party later in the novella. The number of characters, their complexity, and the rapidness with which the narrative changes makes it slightly difficult to follow at times, although I believe that this was intentional on Woolf's part.
Two other characteristic aspects of Woolf's writing style in Mrs. Dalloway are the use of parenthetical interjections and free indirect speech. Free indirect speech, or the use of dialogue or thoughts without quotation marks. Woolf does this to blur the lines of who is narrating the story and, to the same effect as the lack of chapters or separation, to create a fluidity with the change in focus of the novel. Something that interrupts this fluid nature and creates contrast is the parenthetical asides that occur throughout all of the characters' narratives. This breaks up the solid text and does allow for characteristic Woolf dry humor.
Mrs. Dalloway is many things, but it is not an easy to navigate, simple character sketch, as it's billed in plot summaries and in bookstores. If it were that, would it be Virginia Woolf?