Michael Cunningham / Such Good Friends

 

Such Good Friends

A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD

by Michael Cunningham.

343 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Joyce Reiser Kornblatt

November 11, 1990

"I WANTED a settled life and a shocking one," says Clare, one of the members of the troubled menage in Michael Cunningham's absorbing second novel, "A Home at the End of the World." In that confession, Clare speaks for all the characters in this literary ensemble piece -- her gay housemate, Jonathan, who cannot reconcile his love for Clare with his sexual nature; Bobby, his boyhood friend from Cleveland, who joins them in New York, becomes Clare's lover and fathers her baby; Erich, Jonathan's longtime lover, who enters the household near the end of his struggle with AIDS; Bobby's doomed family, and Jonathan's parents, Alice and Ned, who provided Bobby with a haven even as their marriage was failing to nourish the resigned partners themselves. "Really, I think staying is the cowardly thing," Alice tells Clare after Ned's funeral; a short while later, Clare will leave Jonathan and Bobby, taking with her the child they both adore.

If this book finds no comfort in the conventions of fidelity, neither does it celebrate the inability to make a commitment. Michael Cunningham loves his characters deeply, and that love manifests itself in the care of his observations, the patient exactitude with which he attends to the particularities of their experience. Although "A Home at the End of the World" pretends to be a novel of voices, it is in fact the author's voice that informs every page, reaching at times that lyrical beauty in which even the grimmest events suggest their potential for grace. Shortly before his mother's suicide, Bobby remembers how "once, when she passed me in the hall on her way to the bathroom, she stopped long enough to stroke my hair. She didn't speak. She looked at me as if she was standing on a platform in a flat, dry country and I was pulling away on a train that traveled high into an alpine world." And here is Jonathan on Rebecca, the child he is helping to raise: "A baby has no subvert life, and by comparison everyone else you know seems cloaked, muffled, and full of sad little tricks."

Such fluent intelligence alerts us to a writer of great gifts, a writer who ought to have realized how much alike his narrators sound. One wonders what the novel might have been like if Mr. Cunningham had given its narration to a single character -- Jonathan seems the likely choice -- or had claimed for himself the resonant omniscience with which he is so clearly comfortable as a stylist. For as well as he understands the hearts of his characters, his ear seems to fail them; they speak to the reader from a certain remove, a distance that their first-person presentations belie.

That "A Home at the End of the World" is still gratifying, despite such a major flaw, suggests the power of the book's vision and the depth of its concerns. It is the humanity of this novel that finally supersedes its technical problems. This is not the story of gay culture in America or the AIDS tragedy or the yearning for family even as families entrap and wound their members -- or the story of the presence of death in life. All of these dramas work themselves out in convincing detail as the book progresses, but only as they emerge out of the daily realities of the characters' lives. Like Dickens and Forster, authors I imagine he admires, Michael Cunningham appears to believe, as Bobby says, that "our lives are devoted to the actual," and that, in the rendering of those actualities, a novel discovers its themes. This reverence for the ordinary, this capacity to be with the moment in its fullest truth, yields an unfashionable wisdom.

It is fitting that the novel, far from resolving any of the cultural and personal crises it explores, concludes instead with a tender scene in which Jonathan, Bobby and Erich wade naked into a frigid lake. If the image of baptism is a bit too familiar, still the humbleness of Jonathan's awakening, in the presence of his friend and his dying lover, is moving and mature. "I had lived until then for the future," Jonathan says, "in a state of continuing expectation, and the process came suddenly to a stop while I stood nude with Bobby and Erich in a shallow platter of freezing water. . . . I was nothing so simple as happy. I was merely present, perhaps for the first time in my adult life."

The gift of presence, and the maturity to value it: throughout "A Home at the End of the World," Michael Cunningham makes that beautiful offering to the reader. His novel may have problems with form, but in spirit it is memorable and accomplished.

THE NEW YORK TIMES