Michael Cunningham’s writing stands as among the best in the contemporary group of American writers at work today. Started in 1984, A Home at the End of the World took about six years to complete…hard to imagine since the lyrical flow of the words and images seen from the finished perspective appear effortless. But first a little honesty…this reviewer has read only part of the book and so comments are based as much on the movie by the same title as on the book itself. This might not be as much of a cop-out as one would think...Michael Cunningham was heavily connected with the movie and was in fact the movie scriptwriter. My feeling is that the movie and book are two facets of the same creative concept, unlike some movie adaptations where the only commonality is the title (especially true when the author and scriptwriter are two different people).
The story speaks poignantly to all of us…the word “plot” feels almost simplistic. The characters’ interactions are genuinely portrayed. The reader/viewer is readily absorbed in their lives to the point where sometimes their fictional world seems more real than the reality we all inhabit. Here is fiction where the created world is clearer, cleaner, even truer than our own.
This work is about connection, about love, and surprisingly, about death and how death draws us as much as love and sex (remember Freud’s writing on Thanatos, the attraction and will to death?)
Although Bobby is the movie’s protagonist, this is really ensemble writing; the other characters, Clare, Jonathan, and, to a lesser degree, Alice, all share important places in the story.
Bobby is a fragile lost child/man longing for connection…a family where he can be enveloped in warmth and safety. Bobby’s life is infused with loss, first the death of his older brother which he witnessed with horror and disbelief, then the lost of his mother. Only minimally connected to his widowed father, Bobby befriends Jonathan and quickly is enthralled by his safe, cozy protecting family. Even then loss follows as his father too dies. Bobby and Jonathan connect emotionally and physically but the real connection is with Jonathan’s family. Bobby becomes a second son especially to Alice, Jonathan’s mom with whom Bobby forms a strong quasi-mother/lover relationship.
From that background the story deals with the relationship between Clare, a New York City girl who lives with Jonathan, Jonathan, and Bobby in a complex interwoven tapestry of love, support, and respect. Clare has Bobby’s child, a daughter, and the three form an unconventional yet viable family.
Ultimately the triad unit unravels as Clare seeks a more conventional family lifestyle. She leaves, inviting Bobby along, and in doing so presents him with a forced choice…Clare and their child on the one hand or Jonathan, now terminally ill, on the other.
Here is sensitivity, fragility, friendship, grief, and love evocatively presented with just the right amount of drama.
This is not a story of same-sex love. It is the story of our human need to connect, to form a family, to be safe and warm and loved no matter the place but forever…to find a home at the end of the world.
No fluff here…but a story that will resonate with any of us who are even remotely human…that is to say all of us.
Read it, or see the movie. You’ll not be disappointed.