Set on the remote peninsula Ashaunt Point in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, American author Elizabeth Graver’s historical novel The End of the Point (2013) follows the Porter family, whose long residency on the peninsula is upended by World War II and the arrival of the US Army. The specter of war frames the individual struggles of the Porters: the eldest daughter, Helen, goes abroad, hoping that a global education will help her better understand why people suffer; her brother, Charlie, enrolls in the military and ultimately dies in combat. The youngest daughter, Jane, copes in subtler ways as she internalizes the family’s responses to difficult political and social conditions. The novel has been praised for its fusion of political and literary formal elements, showing how World War II disrupted the coming-of-age process for so many children, and permanently altered the genre of the bildungsroman. The book was long-listed for the National Book Award, one of the highest awards in American literature, in the year of its publication. Narrated by Bea, the Porter family’s Scottish nanny, The End of the Point opens in the summer of 1942. Charlie, the eldest Porter child, leaves for war just as the army develops a base in Ashaunt Point. The intrusion of the base on the Porters’ home becomes a material symbol of the pervasiveness of the war. Formerly a place that seemed to defy the progress of time, the Point is suddenly entangled with American current events. Bea is charged mainly with watching over Jane, who is too young to fend for herself. A second nanny is hired to manage Helen and Dossie who start to behave unpredictably in response to the changes occurring in their lives. Helen ends up leaving to study abroad in Switzerland. Bea falls in love with a soldier stationed at the nearby base but is unable to decide whether to take the risk of moving deep into a relationship with someone who might have to part ways at any moment. The novel’s second section is narrated by Helen, beginning with her move to Switzerland. While she is abroad, Charlie dies in combat; his death leaves a permanent scar on the family. She eventually falls in love and bears several children, naming her first son after her brother. The younger Charlie comes to represent America in the wake of World War II, embodying the uncertainty of America’s postwar generation. In the 1960s, he experiments with LSD and is haunted thereafter by panic attacks. The final section of the novel is told from the perspectives of Bea and Helen. Ashaunt Point is further developed after the war. The rich families that once called it their home start to sell off their land. Many new families arrive, developing the Point into a landscape of golf courses and other modern suburban features. An oil spill just outside of Buzzards Bay hints at the mounting climate catastrophe. Even as these things happen, the remaining Porter family members still feel as though the peninsula where they once enjoyed refuge still exists somewhere in the world. This ending carries a deep sense of nostalgia for a pastoral American life made impossible by the wake of modernity.

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Elizabeth Graver

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The End of the Point

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