Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… without a real family. Luckily, Bobby found a new home with his childhood friend Jonathan. The two boys came of age together and discovered their sexuality. As he put it, “A little kiss between brothers, nothing wrong with that.”
Living… just moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with Jonathan and Clare, a sophisticated bohemian. After Alice and Ned, Jonathan’s parents, move from Cleveland to Arizona, Bobby finds himself uprooted. Lacking a place to stay, he moves in with Jonathan.
Profession… baker. Ever since Jonathan’s mother, Alice, taught Bobby how to bake, Bobby has worked at a pie shop.
Relationship Status… in love with Clare, his roommate. Jonathan starts feeling like a third wheel after Bobby and Clare fall for each other – creating tension among the three.
Challenge… making a new family for himself. Bobby has always wanted to be part of a loving family, which he temporarily found with Jonathan’s parents. Now that he’s on his own, Bobby is desperate to make a life and a home for himself among the unusual love-triangle that he’s now at the center of. He even admits to Clare, “I couldn’t be alone.”
Personality… introspective, lonesome, and very charming. Bobby, once a vigorous life-loving teenager, lost himself somewhere along the way. As he tells Jonathan, “To tell you the truth, man, I’m not sure what to do. Seems like I’ve just been… baking for so long.”
Get to Know him in...
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Three friends form a bond over the year, Johnathan is gay, Clare is straight and Bobby is neither, instead he loves the people he loves. As their lives go on there is tension and tears which culminate in a strong yet fragile friendship between the three.
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From Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours, comes this widely praised novel of two boyhood friends: Jonathan, lonely, introspective, and unsure of himself; and Bobby, hip, dark, and inarticulate. In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and, with an odd friend, Alice, create a new kind of family. A Home at the End of the World masterfully depicts the charged, fragile relationships of urban life today.
