A Home At The End Of The World (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
A Home at the End of The World is a love story. A convoluted, unbalanced, discombobulated love story, but a love story nonetheless.Jonathan meets Bobby in the eighth grade, and to call what forms between them a simple friendship would be to apply a cheap misnomer. They bond over weed, music, angst and rebellion. They discover physical sex together. They become defined by the other, a pair united by some commensal inner turmoil that seems incapable to define. And then they graduate high school, and what once seemed inseparable, separates.I love novels where I am privileged to see the character grow, both in age and in substance. Bobby and Jonathan grow, morphing into versions of themselves that I didn’t see coming. One becomes otherworldly, approaching life and disaster with a calm that is perturbing. The other becomes frenetic, a ball of energy and movement that seems poised for a prison break. Both are thrilling and interesting in ways that carry the novel, though neither become what I, the lowly reader, would have foresaw.And perhaps that is why I loved this book, because it so aptly captured life’s unpredictability. We all start off young and impassioned; some slothful, some ambitious, some timid, some bold. We navigate our way from grade to high school, and then we are unleashed to the world. Or better yet, the world is unleashed on us. We think we are ready, only to find that differential equations and foreign language verb conjugations have little to do with solving the more pressing problems of life. Problems such as love, acceptance, actualization, and the ever niggling question of purpose. And it is often these problems and our response to them that determine who we become, with the wisdom gleaned from mama’s table no longer being the sole measuring stick for determining how we move and live.This novel captures the struggle of a search. A search for something substantial in a life that if left unattended can become superfluous. The characters in A Home at the End of The World stay active in the search. Alice, Jonathan’s mother, searches for a freedom defined beyond being a couth and staid caregiver. Clare, the third-wheel in a mental polyamorous relationship, searches for a seal of approval on the eccentricities that she has built her life upon. Bobby searches for a family, for a set of warm bodies that won’t leave him to the space of his solitary thoughts. Erich, an afterthought of a character who weasels his way into the novel’s conclusion with unsettled aplomb, searches first for success, and then for the crumbs of a hard-won love. And Jonathan, cosmopolitan-trend-setting Jonathan, he by novel’s end has come to realize that his search has morphed from liberty to confinement, from wanting the world to merely wanting a home.Every day we wake up and crank the car to drive to a job we subconsciously (or vociferously) hate, we too are searching. Searching for our happiness. Searching for our home at the end of the world. A home where questions that are asked are answered. A home where we don’t have to pretend to be something we are not. A home where walls are not there to trap, but are instead there to shelter. A home where every idiosyncrasy, every strange thread in the fabric of who we are, is celebrated and given a value. A home where we are given the license to be whoever we want, do whatever we want, love however we want, go wherever we want, and die whenever we want. I rated this novel a 5 not because I think it is perfection, or that its literary greatness is on par with The Grapes of Wrath , but I rated it a 5 because I have never read a book that captured so seamlessly the essence of this search. It truly and unequivocally has spoken to my soul.But all things existential aside, this novel was good because the writing was beautiful and the characters were real. Even so, this novel is probably not for everyone. At times the plot moves at a leisurely pace, and the shifts of narration (especially the transitions to Alice and Clare) were not always welcomed. Not to mention that its content, which centers on the absurdity of a love between three flawed adults, might find a way to offend the ultra-conservative. However, flaws will be flaws, and if you can look beyond them, I firmly believe you will find something beautiful blossoming in the core of this novel’s pages.
This book was my introduction to Michael Cunningham, and when I finished it I cried. And then went out and bought everything he'd ever written. I fell in love with this book. At that time in my life I could relate to its characters and their story in a unique way, but it was also Cunningham's writing: spare, lovely, gorgeously aware of minutiae, devastatingly honest. There is a sadness in his work that fills me with a profound loneliness that I find myself both overwhelmed by and grateful for."A Home at the End of the World" tells the story of Jonathan and Bobby, friends since their childhood in Cleveland. Thanks to various family tragedies, Bobby is damaged and strange. Jonathan, raised by a loving family, is naive and kind. The boys become friends, as close as brothers, but the friendship is quickly complicated by the their muddled teenaged libidos. They begin to experiment together sexually.Embarrassed and confused, they lose touch for years only to reunite in New York. Jonathan is openly gay and living with Clare, an older, quirky single woman. Bobby is still lost, simply wandering. Clare and Jonathan, in the classic gay-man-straight-woman pact, have already agreed to have a baby together, but Clare and Bobby immediately become lovers and Clare quickly becomes pregnant. Pact off. Or so it seems, until the group manages to cobble together a little family and a life of the most patchwork variety.It's become, in this "Will & Grace" era, a familiar story. But what Cunningham does with the characters is stunning. Bobby's rootlessness and desperate pansexuality in lieu of true love and nurturing is haunting. Jonathan's desire for a "traditional" life (kids, home, security) and the sadness that comes when he sees that life slipping away is heartbreaking. Clare's mix of selfishness and determined independence is compelling. Cunningham manages, beautifully, to shed new light on the old questions: how do we find home and how are we best loved? The answer, according to "A Home at the End of the World" is a refreshing one: we create it ourselves.
What do You think about A Home At The End Of The World (2004)?
_A Home at the End of the World_ (1990) by Michael Cunningham Added 4/6/08.4/29/11 (adding comments)I remember liking this book and appreciating Cunningham's style of writing. In fact, because I liked this book, I went on to read Cunningham's book, The Hours (1998), which won the Pulitzer prize in 1999 and which was adapted to film in 2002.)I just realized that a movie was adapted from this book as well:"A Home at the End of the World" (2004):http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0359423/http://movies.netflix.com/Movie/A_Hom...(streamable from Netflix)=========================================From the Netflix description:"Boyhood pals Bobby and Jonathan both love the same woman, but in different ways. (For one thing, Jonathan is gay). Yet, undaunted, they all try to make a life together -- and even have a baby -- in 1980s New York. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham's novel gets deft treatment in this story about a troika of close friends who enter into an unconventional living arrangement."==========================================I hope to watch the movie soon.Below are a couple of quotes I copied from the book:========================================="As a little boy he'd seemed like an invention of mine, and I'd loved him with a stinging, tangled intensity that hurt me at times. It was as if the part of me I felt tenderest toward, the little wounded part that wanted only to cry and be held, had been cut out and now lived separately, beyond my powers of consolation." -p.281----------------------------"I'd have liked to tell him something I'd taken almost 60 years to learn: that we owe the dead even less than we owe the living, that our only chance of happiness - a small enough chance - lay in welcoming change." -p. 294==========================================
—Joy H.
"You don't necessarily meet a lot of people in this world."This is the first of Michael Cunningham's books I've read, but I will be reading all of them. He just flat gets it. By the time I was halfway through, I more or less disliked two of the three main characters, but I wasn't tired of reading about them. I wanted to figure them out. I wanted to like them and if I didn't, I wanted to understand why. This is one of those books that you read a sentence or a paragraph or a scene and it hits you deep down, sometimes in the places where you're most insecure. (If you're someone who underlines quotations, get new pencils. Get a *box* of pencils.) There were times when I was sad or upset about something and would read another book instead because I didn't want to feel everything that this one brought up.I'm making this book sound like a big downer. It isn't. It's exhilarating, like all the best books, because it tells you what you know is true and then makes you look at it all again.
—Kim
Such a thoroughly unsentimental book about what love is really all about – especially how much it can hurt. The story unfolds in the voices of the most important characters and moves back and forth among them giving us glimpses into why they behave the way they do as well as how they view each other. Two of them, Bobby and Jonathan, have grown up together needing to depend on each other to deal with the residue of circumstances that have left them wounded and vulnerable. By the time they reach young adulthood and are re-united once again after having gone their separate ways for a while, their relationship is both complicated and strengthened by the presence of a third person, the quirky and somewhat jaded Clare whom they both love but in very different ways. The three of them are bonded together in what appears to the rest of the world to be the most unconventional of relationships which is further complicated when Clare gives birth to the baby that both Bobby and Jonathan consider to be theirs even though it’s obvious to the reader who the real father is. It is this dimension of the story that I found to be the most poignant since it’s so clear that the family the three of them have created is such a loving one. In fact if I were pressed to name the major theme of this deeply moving novel, I’d say it’s all about what it really means to be a family especially when life makes it so difficult. All three of the characters in this novel are carrying heavy burdens that make it almost impossible for them to be who the others need them to be. In the hands of a less skillful author this book could easily have become pathetically maudlin – especially the episodes that touch upon the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic. But Cunningham is a masterful writer who treats his characters with sensitivity and respect and gives them some wonderfully insightful lines, like this one: “Our lives are full of things we can’t control so letting little things happen is good practice.
—Trisha
