Maps to anywhere part 2 House of the future

The longest entry and my particular favorite is entitled "The House of the Future". It is roughly thirty pages long and it is beautifully written in such an unassuming way. It gets its title from the Disneyland exhibit that the 12-year-old Bernard adores. He praises the "durability of plastic" while at home his older brother grows paler and thinner. The memoir ends after the brother's funeral, with a brief meditation on another house of the future--death. Cooper describes a futuristic modular house made entirely of plastic. He compares the staged solitude of the model home with that of his actual home, which was more chaotic and less welcoming, due in part to his older brother’s struggle with leukemia and his father’s infidelities. Cooper frames his family’s losses around the fortified structure of a home that will never break down, never deteriorate and never need repair. The story, subtitled "a reminiscence," conveys in a remarkable way the hopes and fears, the habits and eccentricities of this ordinary yet outlandish family. The belief in the clarity of architecture which sustained the younger brother through the year of his older brother's dying, collapses in the end, leaving him to enter a new house, a new ambiguous space, for making sense of his loss.