Home at the End of the World (Essential Penguin) [Paperback]

Michael Cunningham (Author)

Book Description

Series: Essential Penguin | Publication Date: February 22, 2001

Here are two decades of American life told through four people: Bobby and gay Jonathan, growing up together in a small town in the 1970s; Jonathan's mother Alice; and unconventional Clare, with whom the two grown-up men form a family ...

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This poignant and absorbing novel, parts of which have already appeared in the New Yorker , is one of a kind: at once a bildungsroman that reveals a remarkable gay sensibility, a serious appraisal of how parents and children relate over the years, and a clear-eyed account of '80s ways of looking and living. It is the story of two young Clevelanders, Jonathan and Bobby, who become boyhood friends in spite of, and partly because of, their unhappily adjusted parents. They eventually emigrate to New York, where they end up living together--and with a superbly realized eccentric, Clare, a very hip but desperate woman who tries to relate to them both, ends up having Bobby's child, attempts to share life in the country with them and eventually drifts away. Other characters rendered in detail include Jonathan's mother, Alice, a firm-minded survivor; her ever-optimistic husband, Ned; and Jonathan's sometime lover Erich, who comes to agonizing life for the reader only as he is dying of AIDS. No praise can be too high for Cunningham's writing. He worked six years on the novel, and it shows in the careful way he evokes fleeting thoughts and states of consciousness, in the lyrical sense of the ordinariness of place, whether Cleveland, New York, Arizona or upstate New York, in the musical background that accompanies much of the action, almost as in a movie, and in the unexpected ways that characters who have not met before interrelate when they do. His story is told from several alternating points of view--Jonathan's, Bobby's, Clare's and Alice's--and though this works well in narrative terms, the voices are not as different as one would expect from such fully realized characters. And some scenes, like the birth of Clare's baby, are unaccountably missing. Still, this is a gripping, haunting piece of work from a writer of real promise and power. 35,000 forst printing; $50,000 ad/promo; BOMC and QPB selections; movie rights to Sinecom.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Cunningham's novel focuses on the close friendship of Bobby and Jonathan. As boyhood friends growing up in Cleveland in the late Sixties and Seventies, Bobby and Jonathan form a relationship that is both average and far beyond what most kids would consider "normal." After high school Jonathan moves to New York City, where Bobby soon follows. They become involved with Clare, a slightly older woman who finds each one appealing in his own way. The rest of the novel centers on their unusual life together. This well-written book has lots of good dialog and will appeal to readers who want something other than the tried and true best seller.
- Mary K. Prokop, CEL Regional Lib., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (February 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140299548
• ISBN-13: 978-0140299540
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 4.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (107 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,849,421 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and Specimen Days. He lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

140 of 144 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "...", June 10, 2003

By 

Eric J. Matluck (Hackettstown, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Home at the End of the World: A Novel (Paperback)

I haven't got the words to describe what this book did to me. I wept and bled over its 343 increasingly magnificent pages only to be left in a state of such disorientation that I'm not sure I can write coherently (and certainly not objectively) about it. Yet I'm determined to explain some things, so here goes.

This story is not, I think, so much about two boys' (and, eventually, two men's) search for love as it is about one boy's (Bobby's) search for love and one boy's (Jonathan's) search for how to love. The two are brought together, more by instinct than fate, on their first day of junior high school. Bobby, the less excitable if less conventionally "disciplined" of the two, brings with him a tragic past: he had recently lost his beloved brother to a freak accident, and his mother, a few years later, to suicide. Jonathan is the only child of loving but repressed parents; each, therefore, has something the other craves. At an early point in their friendship, Jonathan, acting rashly, almost gets killed in an accident that brings home to Bobby the loss of his brother. I can think of no more beautiful passage in recent literature than the one that describes Bobby's reaction while helping his friend home, swearing at him in a rage (notably Bobby's only outburst in the book) while holding Jonathan to him tighter and tighter. Thus does Bobby establish Jonathan, in his mind, as his surrogate brother, which allows him to fall in love with his friend without (at this point) having to admit to his sexuality.

As time passes the two begin to inhabit each other's skin (both figuratively and literally), and when Jonathan finally leaves for college in New York, Bobby moves in with Jonathan's parents. In New York, Jonathan meets his "half-lovers" Clare, with whom he ends up living, and a bartender named Erich. He is committed to Clare emotionally but not sexually and to Erich sexually but not emotionally. Then Bobby moves in with them and, after a brief idyll, Bobby starts sleeping with Clare, at which point Jonathan feels pushed out ("triangulated"). Feeling no emotional connection to Erich, and now seemingly alienated from his "true loves," Jonathan turns to the seeming sanctuary of his family, but even there he cannot manage to connect. In the most beautiful and perfect line in the book, Jonathan reflects, "For a moment I could imagine what it would be like to be a ghost-to walk forever through a silence deeper than silence, to apprehend but never quite reach the lights of home."

Rather than self-absorbed, these characters are self-aware, but just to a point. The tragedy is not that they constantly put stumbling blocks in their own paths, but that they know enough to realize what they're doing, yet not enough to realize how to stop.

When another tragedy brings Jonathan, Bobby, and Clare back together, it seems that, with time, they finally will all learn to love each other and start "a new kind of family." Even the less cynical among us could accurately predict that they don't, but the last 85 pages of the book, in which allegiances among the three shift moment by moment, are among the novel's finest, a winnowing out process through which some relationships are finally broken and others cemented, but always with the feel of unerring rightness.

Unfairly, almost any description of this book is bound to make it seem full of contrivance and improbable coincidence. In fact, it is the author's genius to set up a background of absolute inevitability in the characters' lives, in which every action is linked to every other, and to contrast this with the inability of the characters to see those links and make those connections, within their lives, with each other, and, ultimately, with themselves. So even the reintroduction, toward the end, of Jonathan's old lover Erich, who is now dying of AIDS, is not a melodramatic ploy but an essential plot component whereby Clare comes to see her true role in the lives of the men around her, the reader is left in no doubt about Bobby's sometimes equivocal-seeming sexual identity (the nighttime encounter between Bobby and Erich is both surprising and utterly in keeping with Bobby's character), and brings to the fore Jonathan's sense of pervasive guilt (among other things, his guilt over still not loving Erich even though the latter is dying), which leads, ultimately, to Jonathan's epiphany in the final chapter: an ending both radiant and resplendent that, in hands less "cunning" than Michael Cunningham's, might have seemed like a deus-ex-machina but here caps the story of one man's quest to feel.

Obviously, this book will not affect everyone the way it did me. A few years before he died at the age of 91, Somerset Maugham was asked by a critic why, having poured his entire life into Of Human Bondage, he was never able to write another book of equal worth, to which Maugham replied, "Because I had only one life." This book made me feel as though someone had been observing my one life for the past 43 years and turned it into a novel. But since it was someone else who wrote it, there will be others who will read it, weep and bleed over it, and come away from it appreciating their own lives in ways they never thought possible. You don't have to be gay to appreciate this very great book, but I would think it helps. Pride is stamped all over its pages.

52 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding Literature!, June 12, 2000

By 

JCB (I Love Seattle!) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Home at the End of the World: A Novel (Paperback)

A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD introduced me to Michael Cunningham--someone who I now consider one of my favorite contemporary authors. He manages to write honestly about friendship, love, sexuality, and life; and even though the story is told in different voices, there's hardly a break in the narrative--the novel flows beautifully and keeps readers turning pages; Cunningham is a master of words. I found Jonathon's friendship with Bobby very compelling. In fact, the chapters in Part I of the novel are, I think, the best chapters; they reveal the innocence of youth between Jonathon and Bobby and captures their friendship so beautifully. I liked this book a lot because I found it easy to relate to many of the events and experiences in Jonathon and Bobby's life. It was like reading a mirror image of my own life. Novels that are able to draw up those memories and connections in readers are the best ones. One reading of this novel isn't enough; it's a novel to be read over and over again.

53 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing, satisfying, deeply imagined, March 4, 2000

By 

Petsounds "petsounds" (The great Great Lakes) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Home at the End of the World: A Novel (Paperback)

The friend who recommended this book to me called it "a perfect novel." I was skeptical, especially when I read the plot synopsis on the back cover--it sounded trendy and just 'way too 90s for me. But lucky for me, I trusted my friend, so I got to live for awhile in the wonderful world that Michael Cunningham has created.

First, the writing is simply magnificent; I don't think there's a weak or false sentence anywhere in the book. This is rare prose--lyrical and restrained. Second, I think that Cunningham knows every one of his characters inside out--he knows more than he tells us--because these people are utterly real and convincing. This book is packed with beautiful insights into the human condition, but they are completely embodied in the characters. Finally, the story is vividly and compellingly told--you'll stay with it to the satisfying end.

As to the controversy over the various voices, I agree with the previous reviewer.

My friend said this is a perfect novel. I agree. How often do you get to say that?