Review: 'Home/Land,' by Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Mead's 2014 book "My Life in Middlemarch" was an original and insightful hybrid work. Blending literary biography, textual commentaries and snippets of personal memoir, she shone a fresh light on George Eliot's "study of provincial life" and at the same time revealed how the novel had helped and guided her, both when she first encountered it at age 17 and when she revisited it at key stages throughout the years.

If there was a downside to the book it was that Mead's experiences were frequently overshadowed and ultimately eclipsed by Eliot's life story. She avoids this problem in her latest book, another personal account, by positioning herself squarely at the center of it. Her tale comprises the main narrative, but branching off from it at regular intervals are welcome riffs and reflections on a diverse range of topics.

"Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return" chronicles the author's relocation from her adopted home of New York to her birth city of London. After becoming increasingly disenchanted with the American political situation, Mead, a staff writer at the New Yorker, decided to leave the country with her husband and adolescent son.

It was a big step: She had lived in America for 30 years and become an American citizen; London had drastically transformed itself over that time and she harbored mixed feelings about her "chilly, moated island nation." But in the summer of 2018 she and her family finally took the plunge and made the move.

Mead describes how relocation brought dislocation: She spends months in limbo, staying in temporary, short-term accommodation and adapting to new surroundings and different ways of doing things. As she recounts how she acclimatized, one thought gives rise to another. London landmarks — streets, buildings, institutions, recreational space — trigger private memories or spawn meditations on art and literature. A profile of the carpenter she recruits to build her bookcases — a man who, until recently, "had the distinction of being Britain's longest-serving prisoner" — prompts musings on the seaside town of Weymouth where she grew up, her first love, Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" and her late father's birthplace.

Mead continues to zigzag through time by replaying her years starting out as a journalist in New York and tracing her parents' histories. Her non-linear approach never disorientates — rather, it invigorates, creating as it does a rich patchwork of overlapping ideas and recollections. Only occasionally are Mead's ruminations too ponderous for their own good.

This is an artfully crafted memoir which offers a clear-eyed examination of home, roots, belonging, and personal and national identity. At the end Mead explains that she has been "sifting through fragments, filling in blanks, making imaginative leaps, all in an attempt to weave myself back into the city's fabric." In doing so, she shows us how we are shaped by both the places we come from and the places we come to call home.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Home/Land: A Memoir of Departure and Return
By: Rebecca Mead.
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 240 pages, $27.