Micheal Cunningham’s A Home At The end Of The World, in addition to having a long and pointless title, is a thoroughly depressing book. The main theme is that old standard, Life Sucks and Then You Die. This book feels like someone told Michael that he needed to add a few metaphors, then forgot what ‘a few’ means. Nothing is what it is, everything is ‘like’ some other thing. After a while A Home At The End Of The World is like Russian poetry read by someone that only speaks Chinese.
The Audio book version of A Home At The End Of The World has four actors playing the main characters, two men and two women, each with fairly distinct ways of bringing their people to life. They do a good job with the material that they have to work with. This is especially a challenge for Bobbie, who has no personality and the bulk of his dialog is ‘Uh-huh.’ Alice is Jonathan’s mother who married a man when she was seventeen because she liked his hair. Jonathan is gay and in love with Bobbie, though Bobbie seems not to care much about sex one way or the other. The fourth character is Clare, an older woman of means who somehow hooks up with both Bobbie and Jonathan and has a child with Bobbie.
There is an appearance by one of Jonathan’s countless lovers who is dying with AIDS and Jonathan thinks that he is not long for this world at the end of the book. A Home At The End Of The World is full people who are quietly desperate, waking up one day to realize that the life they are living in not the life they had planned on living. Welcome to the club. There are brief moments of happiness, and moments when life is busy and good, but under it all is that endless longing for a better life, whatever that better life might be.
It’s the story of meaningless people leading meaningless lives.
And yet-I found myself caring about these little stereotypes and what was to become of them. They are less novel people-that is people who change and grow as the novel moves forward-and more real people-who find one way of dealing with life and find it easier to just keep doing that one thing forever. Like the old Zen saying goes, wherever they go, there they are.
With the counterpoint of Virginia Woolf, A Home At The End Of The World drags where The Hours soared. Michael Cunningham will likely never write a book as good as The Hours again, but I will keep reading in hopes that he will. A Home At The End Of The World is certainly not in the same league, but it is mining the same general themes and feelings. It’s a modern book full of bad people who think they are good and normal, when clearly they are neither. Or maybe it is just me that is out of sync now. I should run out and get a tattoo and shave my head then re-read A Home At The End Of The World after walking in the characters shoes for a while. Well, maybe not.
