I am prescribing a pleasure reading threshold: let none enter but the lyrical, memorable and accomplished. Enter Michael Cunningham, who by the way, is all of those things according to the New York Times Book Review. Cunningham's A Home at The End of The World isn't at the top of the Times bestsellers chart today, but that's OK. It's still there, lurking beside Clancy and Delaney in "Fiction." Freshmen no doubt recognize the author of the Pulitzer-winning book they read for summer reading. Well, Cunningham wrote this before he wrote The Hours. It's the book behind the book that he wrote when "encouragement, shelter, and even a working typewriter were sometimes hard to find." So in the spirit of "rubbing shoulders with freshmen" that this publication so adamantly promotes, you should bring to the table some knowledge about Cunningham. I don't care what anyone thinks of "freshman ass," U.S. News and World Report says they're smart enough to notch us up to 5th place, so the criterion for casual tete-a-tetes is tougher: I recommend reading Cunningham precisely as an enjoyable way to gain this edge.

The book's construction divides the narrative between the voices of four characters. Now for a titillating thumbnail sketch: Bobby is a boy in Ohio who experiences the loss of his older, definitively badass brother Carleton early in his life. This loss establishes itself within his subsequent meeting and forever-befriending of Jonathan. Boom, we see Jonathan's childhood in a nutshell - specific day is designated to comprise "What's Eating Jonathan," for he is our little boy lost throughout. Cunningham's language is so crisp that within a selection of memories, Jonathan and Bobby's childhoods are expressed fully enough for the novel's focus in their adulthood. Basically, the effect is not unlike a good screenplay which successfully renders childhood in a few gestural scenes with kids that not only look like their older counterparts, but continue to reflect their influence. It's really cinematic like that.

Anyhow, the boys' relationship undergoes close supervision from Jonathan's mother Alice. They all smoke pot together, but Alice isn't passive or anything, it's more a case of her over-inflicting herself on her son and her son's relationship. Then denial rears its ugly head and no one talks about it (or anything else for that matter) to dad, a workaholic named Ned. Interestingly enough he owns a movie "house" that he basically lives at. Up until Ned's death, he can't really relate to anything but the comfy world of movies. Meanwhile, Jonathan and Bobby are so socially exclusive that they even include jacking each other off within their routine of listening to music and smoking out. Alice finds out, and chalks it up to her close relationship to Jonathan. Eventually both male characters (I didn't want to call them boys, but they're not men, because they're "homeless" or estranged from themselves) move to what appears to be the haven of Midwest misfits, New York City.

Chronologically, a big empty space surrounds the coming apart and together again of Jonathan and Bobby in NY. Jonathan went to NYU, while Bobby had stayed in Cleveland working. The difficulty of maintaining "home" relationships underlies this distancing period where contact between them is mutually shirked. By the time Jonathan graduates and starts a crap job writing food reviews, Bobby gets bored working the 9-5 in Cleveland, and moves in with Jonathan.

Jonathan is gay and Bobby isn't; in fact Bobby starts shagging Jonathan's roommate Clare. Enter Clare, the new female voyeur of the confused males. A new love triangle emerges, with Clare on the top because she's older and knows she's in love with both men, whereas they are empty in complicated young ways. When Jonathan's parents move to Arizona for his father's lung cancer, Ohio ceases to be any form of home. Traveling to Arizona, Jonathan feels the geography of the old "home's" replacement caps the emptiness he experiences everywhere. He hates Arizona, and hates hating Arizona: why should it matter? When Ned dies, Jonathan realizes he doesn't know where to scatter the ashes; instead, along with Clare and Bobby, he takes Ned's car back to New York. On the road, Clare tells them she's pregnant. They move out of the city and into the sunshine of Woodstock to raise Clare's child, Rebecca. When Rebecca's reaches the coming-of-cognizance age Jonathan and Bobby were at the beginning of the novel, Clare takes her away unannounced, leaving the home to the males and a new tenant, Erich. Erich was Jonathan's lover, and has gradually deteriorated to a state of complete dependence from AIDS. Together, they find a sense of presence despite the allusive future to follow Erich's death. Enough thumbnailing; the novel's events reveal a minimal amount of Cunningham's work in combined character study. While The Hours isolates the character narratives within larger sections, A Home makes use of its larger chronology (longer than three separated days) through frequent character narrative shifts. Boom boom boom, and the book's over. It's about completion and presence, but conventions are left so unsatisfied that you can believe you are unsatisfied as a result.

An anonymous friend gave an outline of the perfect home to have after school and career: a large Victorian home in a specific neighborhood with two sets of gay couples living in the two wings of the home, pairing off to raise the kids with respect to both parental gender figures. Maybe that's more explicit than the guilty pleasure of playing M.A.S.H., but they're both pretty fanciful. So is overvaluing of migration in our culture: moving around is conventional living. Locating one's "home" seems like the lost paradox through moving everywhere. Cunningham notes that home is supposed to mean "the same", but to him "home" is the difference, "born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we in fact create."