perverse crew we are. What a deeply weird bunch.”
“We’re really, you know, not much weirder than any family,” I say,
“at least we love each other. Didn’t you say that first?”
“Maybe I did. About a thousand years ago.”
I got acquainted with the work of Michael Cunningham, writer of the much
praised Pulitzer-Prize winning novel ‘The Hours’, before the media-frenzy
surrounding the film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep
started. It was through an earlier book of his, “A home at the end of the world”
that I realised this was a writer to be reckoned with. After having seen the film
‘The Hours’ (I have not read the novel –yet) and having heard that a cinematic
adaptation of ‘A home...’ is underway, I thought it fit to re-read this little gem
before its cinematic version comes out, because its images will inherently
become mixed with the images I projected in my mind’s eye whilst reading the
novel.
‘A home at the end of the world’ tells the story of Jonathan, Bobby and Clare,
three youngsters that together form a somewhat strange ménage; strange for
the outside world perhaps, but never really for themselves. Jonathan and
Bobby are childhood friends who grew up together in 1970s Cleveland. Bobby,
who comes from a broken home with a childhood trauma of watching his older
brother die, spends most of his time at Jonathan’s, and becomes very good
friends with Jonathan’s eccentric mother Alice. She introduces him to the art of
cooking, whilst Jonathan and Bobby grow ever closer, experimenting with all
sorts of things together.
Flash-forward to eighties New York, where Jonathan now shares an apartment
with Clare, an independent woman some ten years older than himself. “We
were half-lovers,” Jonathan says at one point, “Together we occupied love’s
bright upper realm, where people delight in otherness, cherish their mates’
oddities, and wish them well. Because we were not lovers in the fleshy sense
we had no use for the little murders.” Clare and I told our worst secrets and
admitted to our most foolish fears.” They form a happy unity devoid of any sex,
which they both get from other men. They even plan to have a baby together,
though that plan might end up like their plans to move to Spain or start a
breakfast delivery service: nowhere.
Their lives are turned upside down when Bobby arrives, fresh from Cleveland.
He has lived the past eight years with Alice and her husband Ned, and working
in the local bakery. When Ned’s lung-disease literally requires a change of air
and they have to move to Arizona, Bobby does not know where else to go apart
from New York, where Jonathan is.
They form a trinity of friendship and become half-lovers split sideways, until the
proverbial sparkle passes between Clare and Bobby and she becomes
pregnant with their child. Jonathan is taken aback, but they will stay together to
form a ménage-à-trois and will leave New York City for the quiet of the country,
where they plan to raise the child, and where Jonathan an Bobby want to
realise their childhood-dream.
Michael Cunningham tells his story from different viewpoints, each chapter-
heading indicating who the narrator is. Thus we see things through the eyes of
Jonathan, Clare and Bobby, and occasionally also through the eyes of Alice. It
is a device that works well in the story, and Cunningham seems to find the right
balance between giving each character a distinct voice and keeping a narrative
going that is coherent; in fact, it seems more like each chapter is told from a
perspective very close to the narrator rather than by each person themselves.
Cunningham has a very supple use of language, resulting in such little gems as
the above-quoted use of ‘half lovers’ and ‘little murders’ indicate. His prose is
littered with these little word-plays and puns. He also seems to have a way with
similes, such as this one from Bobby’s mouth, indicating how it was to see
Jonathan again in New York, after eight years of separate lives: “We set my
bags down, and stood through a moment of difficult silence. Over the years we
had lost our inevitability together; now we were like the relatives of two old
friends who had died.”
‘A home at the end of the world’ is, in the end, about forming your own ideas of
what a ménage constitutes, and how to live your life. To some, a boy living with
the parents of his best friend for years, or a couple and their gay best friend
living together and raising a child may seem out of the ordinary, but ‘A home at
the end of the world’ tries to show that anything can work, as long as you want
it to work and you are comfortable with it. Towards the end of the novel, things
become sadder and somewhat melancholy, and rash decisions take over the
rationale that made the stability pact of this household work.
Do all the households in the end disintegrate, as people die, or decide to take
their lives in a different direction, or is it just this particular household? Surely
Jonathan seems serene at the end of the novel, as he thinks ‘I wouldn’t say I
was happy. It was nothing so simple as happy. I was merely present, perhaps
for the first time in my adult life. The moment was unextraordinary. But I had the
moment, I had it completely.’
