Nathan’s life as an outsider in Britain and return home to America

Nathan’s life as an outsider in Britain and return home to America is a movement from cultural estrangement toward a newly felt, if incomplete, belonging. In England, Nathan experiences the country as something he cannot fully enter or understand; in New York, ordinary encounters and the presence of Jews make home perceptible again. His return resolves the geography of exile more clearly than it resolves the experience of being an outsider.

Britain and the limits of belonging

Nathan’s English life is presented through a later conversation with the unnamed English woman, who asks whether he left because England was too Christian for him. Nathan resists reducing his departure to one cause: the book’s representation of England is not the whole explanation, and their parting was only one among several reasons he left. Yet he acknowledges that, in the novel, England has come to stand for a place that makes him feel foreign. The country is therefore both a lived setting and a literary construction through which the former lovers revisit what their relationship meant.

The woman’s response unsettles a simple division between an English insider and an American outsider. She says Nathan’s company sometimes made her feel outside her own country, but also gave her, through him, a partial sense of being inside it. She had learned from him, even as their closeness made the country seem less intelligible to him. Before he knew her, Nathan thought that some part of England was reaching him; the more he knew her, the less he felt he understood. His estrangement is thus not simply the result of having failed to form an intimate connection. Intimacy becomes the means by which the limits of his understanding are brought into sharper view.

The woman recalls that Nathan spent his days concealed in a small room without even a bed. That detail makes his distance from England physical as well as cultural: he lived there, but much of his life was withdrawn from the public world around him. The room does not explain his departure by itself, and Nathan explicitly gives more than one reason for leaving. It does, however, sharpen the contrast between residence and participation that runs through his account of the country.

Surveillance and life across borders

The narrative’s account of Nathan’s time abroad sits beside testimony about the pressures faced by people moving through the political landscape of Czechoslovakia. A Czech woman describes working at the American Library, a position first obtained through a cultural attaché because she had studied literature. She understood the work as a welcome chance to be among books and use her education; for two years, she says, it was an excellent job. But the organization responsible for approving foreign employment was, in her account, a branch of the secret service. Her popularity with American colleagues made her situation more difficult, and she was eventually called in and asked to work for the service.

The demand was backed by explicit threats of secrecy and prosecution. The woman refused to sign a document before she knew what it contained, then refused the recruitment itself. She says she was told there was no future for her at the library and that she would have to find another job. American officials also approached her to work for them, and she refused them as well. Her account describes a life constrained by pressure from both sides, in which her languages—including German—made her useful to competing interests rather than secure. This is her experience, not Nathan’s; its place alongside his account broadens the book’s treatment of displacement by showing how political power can intrude on ordinary employment and mobility.

A separate recollection of Prague makes the danger of travel concrete. The speaker dates an initial visit to 1971, after finishing a book and traveling from Vienna. He returned in later springs, became accustomed to being followed by police, and in 1975 was stopped on the street by uniformed officers who demanded that he go to a police station. He showed his passport, visa, and hotel identification, but they insisted these were insufficient. He shouted in English and school French, appealed to bystanders, and asked a young German couple to stay nearby in case he was taken away. When the officers went to consult a plainclothesman, he escaped on a passing trolley, changed direction after two stops, and telephoned a Czech friend from a kiosk. The friend told him the police had meant to frighten and harass him. Although he returned to his hotel without further incident, he could never obtain another visa to Czechoslovakia; the friend who had advised him was questioned overnight after the speaker left Prague. This episode belongs to the book’s wider account of cross-border vulnerability, rather than establishing that Nathan himself underwent the same police stop.

Return to New York

By the time the former lovers speak again, Nathan says he is no longer in England and is living in America permanently. The woman has read his book and has hesitated over whether to call him, aware of its possible effect on her marriage. Their conversation makes the return more than a change of address: England, the affair, and the novel have become entangled, so that Nathan’s account of coming home is also an account of how he represented the place and the woman he left behind.

Nathan describes taking long walks in New York and occasionally finding himself smiling and saying “Home.” The recognition arrives in small, unplanned moments rather than as a conclusion he had already reached. He says that the quality he had missed did not become conspicuous to him until he had been back for several months. The delay matters: home is not simply the opposite of England, instantly understood upon arrival, but something that becomes legible through repeated experience of being back.

What he missed, he specifies, was Jews—not merely Jewish people as an abstract presence, but Jews with force, appetite, anger, argument, and impudence. His list insists on public, sometimes abrasive forms of belonging: people who complain, refuse accommodation, and take up space. He jokes that New York is the real obstreperous Zion, and says that even Tel Aviv seems too Christian by comparison with New York. The exaggeration turns cultural belonging into a question of texture and conduct: the city feels like home because its Jewish life is brash and unmistakable, not because it offers quiet ease.

Exile, return, and the novel

When the woman describes him as having returned to the bosom of the tribe, Nathan accepts the description and calls the fact odd. She replies that his return resembles the homecoming in the Odyssey. Nathan playfully asks which role she assigns herself, but she claims the role of Homer: she has been thinking about writing a book about him. The exchange folds their personal history back into literature, reversing the relation between the writer who made a book from an affair and the former lover who now imagines writing about him.

That ending keeps Nathan’s return from becoming a simple reconciliation with place. He can say “Home” and identify what he missed, yet the woman’s account of his novel remains part of the conversation: its England made him a foreigner, while their relationship made her see her own country differently. The return answers one form of estrangement through Jewish belonging in New York, but it does not erase the distance between lived experience and its literary telling. Instead, the homecoming becomes another story the former lovers can dispute, interpret, and potentially write.