HOUSE/COUNTRY
Memoirs of Departure and Return
By Rebecca Mead
In recent years, it has become fashionable to claim that someone needs a special license to write about themselves — that they must be exceedingly famous, unusually rich, or wonderfully traumatized if they want one of those embarrassing excesses, a memoir. car. Anyone who insists on documenting a dull life is guilty of conceit, which is why it is fashionable to blame the flaws of a book on the flaws of the genre. It is well known that autobiographies are naturally doomed to insularity.
In fact, a book is justified by its quality, not its subject. “Home/Land,” a new book by New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead, doesn’t waver for belonging to the maligned species of memoirs† rather, it fails because it is insufficiently interested in the outside world. Despite the many catchy images and distracting anecdotes, it reads like the very well-written diary of a very smart person.
Mead, a veteran reporter specializing in profiles, is the author of three books, two of which are autobiographical. Her most recent, My Life in Middlemarch, is a biblio-memoir that unites criticism, reporting and personal reflection. Though comprehensive, spanning decades as well as continents, even the most meandering passages are somehow connected to George Eliot’s masterpiece. “Home/Land” doesn’t have much of a through line, and it can be insanely discursive as a result.
After an English transplant, Mead decided to return to her native country in 2018, following her dismay at the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Nominally, “Home/Land” describes her move from New York to London, but in reality it is just the same. difficult to say where the book takes place as to say exactly what it is about. The text bounces from reporting to memory and from past to present, going from Mead’s childhood in the coastal town of Weymouth to her adulthood in the stately Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene. There are meditations on Mead’s father, a Civil Service bureaucrat, and her mother, an advertising agency at Harrods; brooding over her husband, a fellow writer, and her emotionally precocious teenage son; treatises on the writings of Thomas Hardy and Graham Greene; researching grave robbery, the sociolinguistic patterns that surround Cockney’s speech, and the origins of the London Underground; and genealogies of landmarks Mead opportunities to pass on the street. While ‘Home/Land’ promotes its interest in the author’s alienation from the land of her birth, it is so laced with interludes that it seems almost entirely made up of asides.
Frankly, Mead’s prose is so useful that it can be difficult to summon the will to blame her. She has a discerning eye and a gift for sharp phrasing. An order of fish and chips is “snowy with salt”; teens wandering the sidewalk play an elaborate “choreography of self-awareness”; and a decommissioned oil rig languishing off the coast of Dover, “looks almost alive, as if it could shake itself awake and rush toward me.”
But for all her careful attention to the subjects she outlines with such fine detail, Mead is often hand-desensitized to political context. In her opening salvo, she recalled the aftermath of the 2016 election with horror, reporting that “the edges of my consciousness had darkened. I felt as if my existence had contracted, shrunk into a paltry survival tunnel’ – a rather melodramatic statement from a writer who lived comfortably and stylishly in one of the country’s most liberal enclaves. She later reports that packing the contents of her Fort Greene brownstone felt like “cleaning up the house after her own funeral.” Yet she makes no mention of the many displaced persons who have not chosen of their own free will to move from one of the most expensive and glamorous cities in the world to yet another one of the most expensive and glamorous cities in the world.
If ‘Home/Country’ is often pleasant to read, it’s because Mead’s writings are locally absorbent. And if we sometimes have the impression that the book is outward-looking, it’s because so many of Mead’s digressions amount to spicy micro-articles about the history of London or New York. Ultimately, though, the connective tissue of the memoir is inescapably personal: the arbitrary assortment of places and persons it deals with can be unified only in terms of their significance to Mead.
“Coincidence,” she writes, “is irrational, embarrassing — as clunky and insubstantial as the plot devices favored by Victorian authors. … But coincidences happen even more often in life than in Victorian novels, and I have a predilection for their numinous significance.”
As an outsider, it’s hard to share her belief that there’s something particularly nuministic about the fact that one of the houses her English realtor showed her was opposite the flat where her father grew up. The problem isn’t that this coincidence is irrational or embarrassing, but that it’s so impenetrably private. Reading a book driven by the kind of personal coincidence that propels “House/Land” is like listening to someone tell a dream whose urgency is available only to the dreamer. “Home country† is a victim, not of his genre, but of his impregnable interiority.