Exile and homecoming

Exile and homecoming in the novel describe an unsettled relation between place, belonging, and the stories people tell about their lives. Nathan's years in England leave him neither simply an outsider nor a settled insider; returning to the United States brings a recognition of home that had been hard to name while he was away. The Unnamed English woman complicates that return by arguing that their relationship helped make England feel foreign to him, even as it offered him a limited form of access to the country.

England as an Unfinished Home

The Unnamed English woman asks whether England, in Nathan's novel, stands for her and whether he has turned her into a foreigner in her own country. Her question treats the book not as a transparent record of their relationship but as an act of representation: Nathan's account may give England symbolic force, while also making her stand for a place that resists his understanding. Nathan does not reduce his departure to this interpretation. He says that he left for many reasons and that their parting was one of them. The novel, he insists, is a book, not a complete explanation of his life.

Her interpretation nevertheless identifies a genuine effect of their intimacy. Nathan says that she sometimes made him feel like an outsider, but also like an outsider who, through her, had become a little of an insider. Knowing her offered a kind of access, not mastery. Before the relationship, he had thought that something of England was reaching him; the closer he came to her, the more elusive the country seemed. He compares the experience to spending half of each year in twelfth-century China, an image that makes cultural estrangement feel like inhabiting a world whose rules remain unreadable. The paradox is central: intimacy brings him nearer to an English life while exposing how much of it he cannot comprehend.

A Room, a Return, and the Recognition of Home

The Unnamed English woman locates some of this estrangement in the conditions of Nathan's life. She recalls that he spent his days hiding in a small room without even a bed, and challenges the idea that he could expect to understand England from that confinement. The room gives his outsider status a material form. His distance from the country is not merely an intellectual problem; it is bound up with a narrow, hidden existence and the circumstances of the affair.

Back in New York City, Nathan says, he understands something. On long walks he sometimes finds himself smiling and saying aloud that he is home. The recognition does not arrive as a broad theory or an explanation of everything he had missed. It comes intermittently, during ordinary walks, and becomes legible only after he has been back for several months. His return changes the meaning of the earlier absence: what he missed becomes visible in the place he has come back to, rather than fully understood while he was abroad.

That recognition remains partial. Nathan does not claim that home makes every place or experience clear. Instead, his return gives him a point of comparison: he can feel what he had been longing for, even though he had not consciously named it in England. Homecoming is therefore a belated discovery, less a solution to exile than an awareness of what exile had made him miss.

Jewish Belonging and the Epic of Return

The conversation turns Nathan's return into a question of Jewish identity. The Unnamed English woman calls it a return to the bosom of the tribe, and Nathan accepts the description while finding it odd. Her phrasing makes homecoming communal as well as national: coming back means re-entering a Jewish world whose particularities had acquired renewed force for him after living abroad.

Nathan's account of his response to public life in the United States gives that belonging a concrete, unruly character. He describes watching a Jewish mayor whom his liberal friends dislike and feeling affection for the mayor's conspicuous ethnic manner. On a drive to New Jersey to visit his father, a man in the next car insults him without Nathan knowing what he has done wrong. Nathan smiles and invites the man to intensify the confrontation. The encounter and the mayor's public presence restore something he associates with the assertive, unapologetic energy of New York; amid the jostling, he begins to remember what it means to be human. Home, in this account, is not presented as quiet comfort. It includes friction, ethnic visibility, and a public life that can feel abrasive yet rejuvenating.

The Unnamed English woman frames the return through the Odyssey, calling Nathan the one who has gone home. She then casts herself among the figures Nausicaa and Calypso, asking what role she occupies in his version of the journey. Nathan answers that he is thinking of himself as Homer and says he has been thinking about writing a book about her. The exchange makes the homecoming story self-conscious: the returning figure is also a writer who turns people and places into narrative. The title he proposes, Kiss and Tell, sharpens the difficulty. His account of exile and return is inseparable from the question of what he may tell about the woman who was part of his life abroad.

Political Displacement and Restricted Movement

The book's other accounts of Central Europe give cultural estrangement a more coercive context. Olina recalls that she worked for two years in the American Library, a job she had understood as a chance to use her literary studies and work among books. She says the organization that arranged foreign employment was, in reality, a branch of the Czechoslovak secret intelligence agency. When officials later tried to recruit her, they presented the discussion as a state secret and threatened prosecution and up to seven years in prison for disclosure. Olina refused to sign an unknown document or work for them; American recruiters also approached her, and she refused them as well. Her account shows how political pressure could enter ordinary employment and make the choice to leave costly.

Olina also recalls being taken for questioning at twenty-one after the authorities discovered her in a hotel with the male visitor. The officials questioned her about the encounter and whether they had slept together; she remembers trembling and being frightened, despite the questioning lasting about an hour. These episodes distinguish her exposure from Nathan's sense of cultural foreignness: in her account, surveillance, threats, and constrained choices give displacement immediate institutional stakes.

A separate account of a 1975 police stop in Prague shows another form of restricted movement. After refusing to go to the police station, the speaker escapes by boarding a trolley, changing direction, and calling a Czech friend from a phone kiosk. He returns to his hotel without further incident, but afterward can no longer obtain a visa for Czechoslovakia; the friend who helped him is taken from his home and questioned through the night about the visits. Against these accounts of surveillance and blocked return, Nathan's homecoming to the United States is not a universal model of exile resolved. It is one particular return, made meaningful by distance, memory, and the recognition of a belonging that had been difficult to perceive from abroad.