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PAR.TISAN REVIEW
The book is told in a chain of voices as we follow the lives of two
unhappy Midwestern families. At thirteen, Jonathan frets and tugs at the
stifling strings that have bound him dangerously close to his discontented
mother, while his schoolfriend Bobby is oppressed by irrational guilt
about the accidental death of his beloved older brother. Seeking a refuge
from their teenage
angst,
the two boys construct a cocoon of marijuana,
rock music, and sexual fumbling, from which Jonathan's mother is
pointedly excluded. Eventually Jonathan, grown and gay, finds a home
of sorts in New York, where he shares an apartment with the raffish
Clare, the most vividly realized of Cunningham's characters.
One of nature's bohemians, and worse, Clare has been a lifelong
rebel against her parents' bourgeois rectitude. At the age of thirty-six,
Jonathan tells us, she:
had already gotten through a marriage, an abortion, dozens of lovers,
and three changes of career. ... Clare's rival was her own image, the
elaborate personality she'd worked out for herself. She lived at a
shifting, troubled distance from her ability to be tough and salty and
"interesting." ... She'd been the lover of a semi-famous woman
author. She'd taken heroin and opium and enough Dexedrine to re–
quire treatment at a clinic. ... My own life, compared
to
hers,
seemed timid and cautious.
As we see her at first, Clare is a quintessential creature of the sixties,
reckless and anarchic, yet her transformation in the course of the story is
portrayed with a delicately sympathetic understanding of the biological
desperation that finally allows her to break the leash of self-destruction.
When Bobby comes East from Cleveland, he becomes Clare's lover, and
the three move to a ramshackle house in Woodstock where they hope
to live as a "new kind of family." But life and death intervene with their
irreconcilable imperatives; they are the poles of Cunningham's concern
with his characters' confusions of certainty.
When Clare's daughter by Bobby is born, she is astonished to find
that mothers "become monsters of care, inexorable, and if we occasion–
ally lose track of the finer, imperishable points of the soul while
ministering to the fragile body, that can't be helped." Motherhood has
liberated Clare from her pathological obsession with the worst of hersel(
While Clare becomes a tiger fiercely protective of her child, Jonathan's
lover, Erich, comes to the Woodstock house to die of AIDS. As
Jonathan awaits the inevitable consequences of too many promiscuous
couplings with "a full platoon of strangers," he broods about the lethally
mindless illusions of sexual freedom: "We'd thought we lived at the be–
ginning of an orgiastic new age, in which men and women could answer
