Subject: Struggles of a New Age Family 
Date: Published: 12/28/90 (112 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

    LEISURE & ARTS -- Bookshelf:
    Struggles of a New Age Family
    ----
    By Amy Gamerman

    Midway through Michael Cunningham's "A Home at the End of
 the World" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 343 pages, $18.95), a
 son confronts his father on a lonely stretch of Arizona
 desert.  Jonathan, a gay man approaching his 30s, feels
 detached and alone.  Why, he asks, can't he make a life for
 himself?  
    But the conversation is cut short when his father suffers
 a sudden, agonizing attack of emphysema.  As the two slowly
 make their way back toward the lights of the parental
 condominium, Jonathan muses:  "They were like holes punched in
 the night, leaking light from another, more animated world.
 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."
    A yearning for home -- for a secure and fixed place in the
 world -- is what drives this sad, eloquent work of fiction.
 For the characters whose stories are told here, it is a place
 just beyond reach.  Families -- at worst something to escape
 -- are makeshift alliances at best, poor defense against the
 forces of age, illness and disaffection.
    This novel began attracting attention well before its
 publication date, when excerpted chapters appeared in the New
 Yorker.  Mr. Cunningham, a 38-year-old writer who has yet to
 quit his day job at Carnegie Corp., is no writing-workshop
 upstart.  This, his second novel, took six years to write.  His
 first, the 1984 "Golden States," has since gone out of print
 -- the author having decided that it fell short of his own
 standards.
    One hopes that a different fate awaits "A Home at the End
 of the World."  Told in four different voices, this is the
 story of Jonathan and Bobby, who become boyhood friends in
 Cleveland during the 1970s.  Jonathan, a pensive outsider,
 feels stifled by his close relationship with his mother.  The
 drug-dazed and disheveled Bobby is the casualty of a family
 tragedy that begins with the death of his adored older
 brother.  The two boys escape their unhappy home lives by
 smoking dope, playing rock records and engaging in furtive
 sex.
    Standing just outside this charmed circle are two women.
 Jonathan's mother, Alice, a dissatisfied housewife, sees
 Bobby as a threat, but takes him in out of pity and her own
 boredom.  As the novel shifts to the boys' East Coast
 adulthood, the mother role is picked up by Clare, an older
 woman who becomes Jonathan's East Village roommate during his
 stint as restaurant critic for a hip Manhattan paper.
    The pair play at keeping house:  Clare is the "half-lover"
 Jonathan lives with and confides in, but for sex -- and
 nothing else -- Jonathan turns to Erich, a lonely would-be
 actor.  When the now-orphaned Bobby moves in -- having been
 gently pushed from the nest by his surrogate mother, Alice --
 Clare and Jonathan acquire a token son.
    This offbeat family takes a step closer to reality when
 Clare, desperate for a more literal kind of motherhood, takes
 Bobby into her bed and conceives a child with him.  The three
 set up camp in a dilapidated Woodstock house, with both men
 playing father to the infant Rebecca.
    What keeps the novel from degenerating into a paean to the
 nontraditional family is Mr. Cunningham's surgeon-like
 detachment from his characters' confused longings.  This New
 Age family cracks just like a traditional one.  "At least we
 love each other.  Didn't you say that first?  " Bobby asks, only
 to be told by an increasingly moody Clare:  "Maybe I did.
 About a thousand years ago."
    Nor does the novel lapse into sentimentality when the
 household acquires a token grandfather in Erich, who is dying
 of AIDS.  Here, the virus -- which is never mentioned by name
 -- just seems like another form of the alienation that each
 of the trio seems to suffer from.  Jonathan, who is probably
 infected himself, remarks on a "a floating sensation, as if
 your hours didn't add up to whole days and your presence .  .
 .  didn't affect the landscape as human presences ordinarily
 do."  And AIDS fails to bring the characters closer together.
 Nursing Erich with "the tenderness I hoped I might inspire in
 others if my vigor leaked away and my body started to
 change," Jonathan keeps his distance from his "half-lover"
 until the end.
    The territory Mr. Cunningham claims here is fairly
 well-traveled:  a gay man dying of AIDS, a middle-aged woman
 rushing to beat her biological clock, a son estranged from
 his parents.  But the unsparing clarity of his prose makes
 them seem fresh and interesting.  Even the toddler Rebecca,
 who at the age of two discovers "the lush possibility of
 saying no," is satisfyingly unpredictable.
    The only time the novel jars is when it shifts from the
 characters' speaking voices to their more meditative
 narrational ones.  This is most glaring with Bobby, who goes
 from inarticulate sentences studded with "likes" and
 "reallys" to eloquent, even lyrical passages of prose.
    But it's hard to complain about prose so finely pitched.
 Bobby, bathing a dying Erich, sees him as "lost in his own
 mystery, staring into a hole that keeps opening and opening."
 Even the smallest details are sharp-edged and vivid:
 Rebecca's abandoned doll lies "grinning with stony rapture at
 the sky."
    Images like these, which fuse the taut, distilled imagery
 of a poem with the immediacy of a snapshot are what make this
 novel so memorable.

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