Geography

Michael Cunningham’s pointed A Home at the End of the World is an uncompromising and heartfelt, but sometimes slightly farfetched, vision of modern life.

Jonathan Glover and Bobby Morrow are teenagers in a tiny, sleepy Cleveland town. Bobby is loud but strangely, paradoxically polite, free of most, if not all, ethical qualms. Jonathan is quiet and impressionable, gay and unsure of himself, living somewhat on the social fringes. The two quickly become inseparable.

There is a time jump to years later, when the boys are in their twenties. Jonathan is living in New York with outlandish, irritable, but somehow likeable Clare, ten years his senior. Bobby is still in Cleveland, living with Jonathan’s parents and attempting to open a restaurant. When Jonathan’s parents move to Arizona, Bobby is forced to do something—and so Jon’s apartment phone rings.

The book is really about what family really means, and what each person can bring to an arrangement. It’s hard to define, especially in the context of the book, unless I’m going to give away the entire thing, which I’m not. The book was good—the writing superb—and the ending, while, to me, somewhat unsatisfying, was surprising. Ordinarily I think I would have enjoyed it, but while I was reading the book I was just looking for something different.

My pet peeve about the book has nothing to do with anything between the covers: it has to do with the fact that the entire book, pretty much, was given away on the back cover. There were seventy pages in the book that were not detailed by the blurb. This, understandably, rendered the book rather suspenseless, which was a disappointment. I don’t know who writes these things—according to Max Barry, in Australia at least, the authors do it—but they should really refrain from rendering actually reading the book pointless.

Sometimes I’m just not in the right frame of mind to really read and process certain books. This was one of those things, one of those books: I really think I could have enjoyed it more—and certainly would have had more to say about it—had I read it when I didn’t already have so much on my mind.