Nathan’s return to America

Nathan’s return to America marks more than a change of residence: it is the point at which his estrangement in England becomes legible as a longing for home. He has settled in the United States for good, but the meaning of that return emerges gradually, through a conversation about his novel, his former relationship, and the Jewish life he finds again in New York.

Departure from England and the limits of the novel

Nathan tells his former lover that he no longer lives in his studio in England and is living in America permanently. She asks whether he returned because England was too Christian for him, an interpretation she has drawn from his book. Nathan resists reducing his decision to the novel’s representation: the book is a book, he says, and he left for many reasons, with their parting only one of them. The exchange keeps the return from becoming a neat consequence of the affair or a simple enactment of the fiction.

His former lover nevertheless sees the novel as making her stand for England, and herself into a foreigner in the country where she lives. Nathan’s account complicates that reading rather than simply confirming or dismissing it. Listening to him sometimes made her feel like an outsider, she says, but also like an outsider who had become partly an insider through him. She had learned from him; he had not merely eluded her, but made her more conscious of how much of the surrounding world eluded her. Before knowing him, she had thought that England was beginning to make sense. The closer she came to Nathan, the more it seemed as remote as twelfth-century China, and finally she felt she understood nothing.

The novel and the return therefore do not settle into a single explanation. The English woman reads the fiction as a map of Nathan’s departure, while Nathan insists on a life larger than the book’s plot. Their disagreement also reveals a reciprocal displacement: he made aspects of England newly perceptible to her, even as his presence sharpened her sense of not belonging there. The return closes his English residence, but it does not turn that experience into a fully mastered or transparent one.

Learning what home feels like

Nathan’s sense of home becomes clear only after he has been back for some months. Walking for long stretches through New York, he sometimes stops and hears himself say aloud, “Home.” The discovery is physical and unforced: he finds himself smiling before he has deliberately named what he missed. He tells his former lover that the recognition did not appear in any blatant way until he had been back for a while. Return is thus not an instant resolution at the moment of arrival, but a recognition that gathers in ordinary city walks.

When she teases him as one of the people who talk to themselves in New York, Nathan explains that he is responding to something he had missed terribly and longed for. The city restores not quiet comfort but a public, combative human presence. His phrasing recasts what might look like urban aggression as a sign of vitality: people push to be first, speak forcefully, and refuse to make themselves unobtrusive. The contrast with England is not presented as a measured judgment of every person in either country; it is Nathan’s account of the qualities through which he recognizes his own attachment.

Jewish belonging and public life

Asked whether he means Jews, Nathan specifies a Jewish presence marked by force, appetite, anger, argument, and impudence. He contrasts Jews who make themselves accommodating with Jews who complain, provoke, and take up space. He calls New York the real “obstreperous Zion,” turning the language of national and religious belonging into a description of the city’s unruly everyday culture. The distinction matters to his return: what he missed was not simply a population or an abstract identity, but a public style in which Jewishness could be assertive and unashamed.

His comparisons make the point deliberately through contrast. When his former lover again suggests that England was too Christian, Nathan replies that even Tel Aviv seems too Christian beside New York; after London, he says, even Ed Koch looks good to him. The joke makes no claim that these places are identical or that one political figure resolves his sense of belonging. Instead, it measures his changed response: the emphatic Jewish presence he encounters in New York now feels restorative, even when it appears through a figure his liberal friends dislike.

A small encounter on the drive to visit his father gives that preference a concrete form. Emerging from the Lincoln Tunnel, Nathan is called an asshole by a man in the neighboring car, though he does not know what he has done to provoke him. Rather than take the insult as a reason to withdraw, he smiles and encourages the man to press the confrontation. He describes the encounter as wholehearted, unapologetic pugnacity, and says that seeing people everywhere pushing to be first helps him remember what it means to be human. The welcome he finds is therefore not politeness but friction: the return makes aggression feel, to him, like evidence of an inhabited world.

The return as homecoming

His former lover calls this a return to the bosom of the tribe. Nathan agrees, but finds the fact odd; she treats it as unsurprising and invokes the story of the homecoming in the Odyssey. Their brief exchange offers two scales for understanding the event. To her, the return fits a recognizable pattern of departure and homecoming. To Nathan, the return is both real and surprising, because its force became apparent only after he had lived away and come back.

The event consequently remains more complicated than a simple reversal of exile. England had made Nathan feel like an outsider, but his former lover’s account shows that intimacy there could also make him, and her, partly insider. New York gives him a more immediate recognition through the presence of Jews and the city’s assertive public life, yet he does not claim that he now understands everything. What changes is his capacity to recognize a place as home: after England’s estrangement, he can walk through New York, hear the word rise to his lips, and understand that he had been longing for what he found there.