A Home at the End of the World...

I just read A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham. I picked it up not realizing that he wrote The Hours, which I have not seen, or that A Home at the End of the World was made into a movie with a group of actors I do not like. If I had known, I might not have started it.

It reminded me of the novels of Carol Shields, which is not a recommendation.

Spoilers follow. If you care, stop reading now.

It's the story of two American boys and their parents, and a woman named Clare. Each chapter is narrated in turn by one or the other of them; mostly Bobby and Jonathan, who are friends or lovers from childhood. Jonathan moves to New York and takes a lover named Erich and a roommate named Clare; he makes a big point of not loving Erich, though I was beginning to wonder how he and the author defined 'love' in the first place. Eventually Jonathan falls in love with both Bobby and Clare, but his first act, on realizing this, is to run away and disappear from their lives.

By that time, I'd long lost sympathy for everyone in the book except Clare. Then Clare eventually leaves both Bobby and Jonathan, taking their daughter, without a word or warning or explanation - only a few lies about going to visit her mother. I decided they were all chumps. No sense of commitment whatsoever, and not even the sense that commitment might be something people might consider.

All the characters seemed undersexed and divorced from life. Every single one. Selfish, too. I think this says more about the author than the world he's writing about.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (3x07) - Revelations

Buffy 3x07 - Revelations

~ ~ ~

( I think of this as the Gwendolyn Post episode. )