A Home at the End of the World

by Michael Cunningham

Apologies again for not posting in weeks. Those of you who know me most likely know that I recently got married (in fact most of you were probably at the wedding, which, appropriately, was held at the HousingWorks bookstore, here in New York City! But I have been reading - as well as teaching and grading and so forth - ever since then and have finally tonight had a good chance to sit down and reflect on what's crossed my plate recently.

A Home at the End of the World was always vaguely on the end of my to-read list - I'd seen The Hours back when it first hit theatres, and more recently read a Cunningham short story that knocked my socks off (Pearls) and was always picking up Home at the End of the World in bookstores, with it's glossier post-movie reprinted cover, featuring a very young, not-yet-ludicrously-famous Colin Farrell. Then last semester a colleague of mine had the book on her office shelf and said she taught a few chapters from the beginning in her Fiction of Adolesence course... though when I bought myself a copy and told her I was excited to read it finally, she confessed she'd never finished it herself.

But I found myself having trouble putting it down, even though I was running around Manhattan, ostensibly helping to plan my upcoming wedding. Cunningham's a brilliant writer and he creates two amazing narrators in childhood friends, Bobby and Jonathan. A few chapters go by before the two boys meet, which lets you get to know them on thier own terms first, and then the pace picks up as they begin to become fast friends. It's Cleveland in the 1970s and there are quite a lot of drugs flying around - both boys seem oddly, delicately damaged. Bobby is the near-orphan whose older brother has just died in a somewhat sad and absurd fashion, running into a glass door, possibly the result of doing a lot of drugs (and sharing with his brother). Jonathan is a good kid with young disillusioned parents, and having some issues with his burgeoning homosexuality, but also with simply loving to lie to people. A combination of both these things soon draws the two boys together.

Cunningham manages to keep you feeling comfortable but always somehow surprised at the little turns in the story - many of which are very subtle. Jonathan and Bobby eventually have periodic sexual encounters but while they mean a lot to Jonathan, it's unclear what they may mean to Bobby - who feels a general detachment from all emotions, it seems. A few chapters are narrated by Alice, Jonathan's mother, and this adds unexpected dimensions to the family as they half-adopt Bobby and Alice begins to become half-attracted to him as well. Cunningham steers his book clear of the tawdry turns this type of story could take, but keeps the complicated emotions front and center.

There is a break in the book and we flash forward to the early 90s and Jonathan is living in New York with a woman named Clare, the quintessential gay man and kooky straight girl roommate combination. Jonathan writes for a Food Magazine and dates men he won't stay overnight with or ever introduce to Clare. Clare makes fashion items out of thrift-store finds and sells them to rich women, as she waits for a trust fund to mature. They joke about having a baby someday - Clare more seriously than Jonathan.

You can see where this is going, suddenly? Bobby, who has been living with Jonathan's parents all this time, ends up moving to NYC and lives with them. He and Jonathan work past the residual sexual awkwardness from their boyhood. Bobby and Clare fall in love. Clare gets pregnant. Jonathan fears he's been replaced. And finally they all decide to move out of the city, to the mountains, where the three of them can merge their individual oddities and dysfunctions into what will (hopefully) be a loving and functional home that no two of them could ever provide. There's a lot more going on by this point, much of which is far less predictable, but I won't give that stuff away. All I can say is that it does continue to surprise all along the way. There's an absolutely heart-breaking moment involving a riding lawnmower that I may never forget.

I was nervous at the outset with this book because I tend to be skeptical of tons-of-drugs adolescence stories, and I was suspicious that once the boys got to New York it would rapidly turn into RENT, the novel. But it really didn't, quite. In many ways I think I connected even more to the 90s bohemian Village idea by reading this book than I ever did watching RENT, each of the six times I saw it. There's far less flashy hipness to the characters in this book. They don't have a lot of high-soaring artistic visions and ideals (not that there's anything wrong with those) but they do have a lot of real heart and earnest confusion as to how they're supposed to be grown-ups in the real world - and that's a theme that I will always, really, like.