North Carolina

North Carolina is the setting of Lucas’s American life: a home shaped by his investment-company job, his marriage to Denise, and a sense of identity he experiences as strangely detached from himself. When he returns to London because his mother Barbara is dying, the distance between the two places becomes a measure of how uncertain the idea of home has become for him.

Lucas’s American Home

Lucas has spent ten years working for the same investment company, whose benefits include his house in North Carolina. It is an eighties-built Dutch Colonial-style clapboard home, with a picket fence and a motorised swing on the porch. The house represents the material stability of his American life, but that stability depends on his employment: after losing his job, Lucas recognizes that the company will take the house.

A Life He Experiences as Unreal

Back in London, Lucas regards the American version of himself as a cardboard cut-out, a cartoon character he has never really controlled. His life in the United States seems preposterous and dreamlike, even though it is where he has been living. The account places that estrangement beside the tangible details of his North Carolina home, making the house both a real possession and part of a life he struggles to recognize as his own.

Departure and Significance

Lucas leaves North Carolina after learning that Barbara is dying and reaches London after a journey of roughly thirty hours. His wife Denise does not accompany him; Lucas is relieved that she never knew Barbara. In London, he faces his mother’s approaching death, his failing marriage, and the loss of the job that provided his house. North Carolina consequently stands not as a secure point of return but as the setting of an increasingly precarious life, while Lucas’s return to London unsettles his assumption that the United States is truly home.