Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… in the 1960s. Clare is truly a product of the bohemian flower-power generation, and is still trying to live out their dream.
Living… in Greenwich Village with the “gayest living human being ever,” Jonathan, and his childhood friend – the charming and mysterious Bobby.
Profession… making hats. Clare, an artist at heart, “picks up a little change” by making fashionable headwear. With a trust fund (left by her grandfather), Clare can afford to pursue her dreams.
Relationship Status… confused. After falling for Bobby, Clare inadvertently drives a wedge between him and Jonathan. She tries to tell Jonathan what she thinks she wants: “And then Bobby came along, and I fell in love with this one, and I think that we… that the three of us, maybe we could…” No, she’s not quite sure what she’s looking for.
Challenge… balancing between her friendship with Jonathan and her sexual relationship with Bobby. After Clare becomes pregnant with Bobby’s child, she decides that she wants them to try and form a real family, as unorthodox as it might be.
Personality… a bohemian free spirit. Clare is not tied down by society’s conventional restrictions. She believes that she can make her alternative lifestyle work, even with everything going against her.
Get to Know her 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.
