The Road Home [Hardcover]

Two months after its publication, everybody ought to be talking about THE ROAD HOME. It ought to be the book of the year, and it isn't. It's my book of the year, though. I dreaded an uplifting parable of the Immigrant Experience. What I got was a hero of such specific integrity, depth, decency and pain that his journey becomes not simply the story of a stranger in a strange land, but a revelation of the truths "foreigners" tell us about ourselves.

When the sawmill where Lev worked closes down ("They ran out of trees"), he leaves Auror, his (fictional) village somewhere in Eastern Europe, entrusting his young daughter to his mother's care (his wife has died, tragically young). In London, some people are kind to him; others, casually cruel: "This is how these people see me," Lev thinks at one point, "as a turnip with no intelligence and no voice." He never comes off as a victim, though. He finds a rented room and a job washing dishes in a chic restaurant, and ultimately discovers a passion and talent for cooking that he parlays into a dream for the future --- and a pathway back to his homeland.

Lev is almost old-fashioned in his sensibility (and even in his vices, cigarettes and vodka). In teeming, driven modern London, he is allergic to the brittle, pseudo-creative denizens of the culture of cool. But he seems to have an instinct for connecting with those who appreciate his discipline and understand his lingering sadness (it's no accident that he improves his English by struggling through HAMLET; it's as if the ghosts of Auror have followed him to Britain).

Probably my favorite moments in the book are set in the restaurant. Rose Tremain evokes the controlled chaos, pinpoint timing and near-military precision of a professional kitchen --- it's run like a small autocratic state --- in several brilliantly cinematic scenes. What's exciting is to watch the evolution of Lev's taste: his first encounters with refined cuisine (Auror is not known for four-star bistros), his experiments with cooking, and finally his fantasy of a restaurant of his own. There is an affection for food here --- what it is, what it does, where it comes from --- that makes THE ROAD HOME a nourishing novel as well as a moving one.

I was enthralled, too, by Tremain's dense, Dickens-sized cast of fully realized supporting characters. To name a few: Rudi, Lev's volatile friend back home, a taxi driver whose temperamental secondhand "Tchevi" is a symbol of the U.S. as another "promised land." Lydia, Lev's accidental companion on the bus to London, who develops a crush on him and is often his reluctant savior. His landlord, Christy, a good-hearted, alcoholic Irishman whose wife has left, taking their daughter. The staff of the restaurant, most significantly Lev's lover, Sophie ("Hardly anybody is good," she tells him. "But you are"). The Indian woman Christy courts. The elderly residents of the nursing home Sophie and Lev visit on Sundays. The Suffolk farmer, Midge, "lonely lord of his fruit and vegetable kingdom," who hires Lev as a picker.

Tremain's complex, imaginative people are certainly part of her literary gift, but she also gives them splendidly authentic landscapes to inhabit and big questions to grapple with. I've read five of her eleven novels, and what's astonishing is her range. She writes wonderful historical fiction that is both intimate and panoramic: RESTORATION and MUSIC & SILENCE are set in the 17th century; THE COLOUR is a tale of the 19th-century gold rush in New Zealand; the provocative SACRED COUNTRY, with its transsexual themes, ventures into bold new territory; and THE WAY I FOUND HER is a sophisticated coming-of-age story set in Paris.

THE ROAD HOME, though modern in subject and style, has something of the 19th-century novel about it (that's a compliment). It's meaty, ungimmicky and transporting. Its picaresque plot unfolds without strain as Lev shapes his expatriate existence and mourns his wife and former life. Perhaps the ending is a bit neat. As the title suggests, Lev does in a sense come full circle. But is that a bad thing? (Ambiguous or downbeat endings, I think, are overrated.) Would it have been better for Lev to die --- like his wife, like Hamlet --- or remain a lonely exile? I don't think so.

Although THE ROAD HOME is set in Great Britain, its lessons certainly apply to our own country. A nation of immigrants, it is also a place where someone of a different culture may be treated with loathing and suspicion, as an alien "type" rather than a person. Without being in the least preachy, Tremain shows us ourselves --- the good, the bad and the unforgivably ignorant --- through Lev's eyes. Reading her book has already made me more generous and less suspicious as I ride New York City's multi-ethnic subways. Squeezed into a crowded rush-hour car, I remind myself that the exotically dressed stranger beside me undoubtedly has, like Lev, a human story that should invite not fear but compassion.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

"The Road Home" is one of those books that succeeds in making you look at the world around you with new eyes. It's the story of Lev, a widower who immigrates from an unspecified country in Eastern Europe to the UK in the belief that it will be easy to find well-paying work there and thereby support his mother and daughter back home. Instead he finds that London is both considerably more expensive and less welcoming than he anticipates. Eventually he does find work and start to build some friendships, but it's far from an easy journey for him.

Rose Tremain makes us care about Lev and acutely communicates his loneliness and isolation. Occasionally he does things that we don't like, but he still maintains our sympathy and interest throughout the book. In fact, all of the characters are perfectly realized and feel incredibly real. The first two thirds of "The Road Home" are beautifully written: this is one of those books that you carry around with you so that you can read a bit more whenever you get a chance. It made me think about (and care about) the experiences of immigrants in a new way.

My one criticism of the book is the ending, which worked on one level but felt too contrived and too neat on another. It was also telegraphed well in advance, so that when it did eventually wrap up it felt almost like an anti-climax rather than a culmination of all that had gone before. I loved this book very much, but the final third did not grab me as much as what had gone before. Nevertheless, one of my favorite books this year.

Do publishers not want to sell books? The hardback cover shows a faceless street in far-from central London, bedraggled shoppers walking past gray concrete buildings blurred by the streaming rain. The opening description is not any more enticing: a fortyish man from some Eastern European country, widowed and out of work, journeys to London by fifty-hour bus to try to make money to support his mother and young daughter. He finds a city more expensive, less hospitable, and more xenophobic than anything he could have imagined. Within days, he is sleeping under somebody's basement steps.

But he also finds a few unexpected acts of kindness, like the Moslem cafe owner who gives him a temporary job and a free meal. Our hero, Lev, turns out to be a resilient person with a lot of determination and a sense of humor -- humor that (once he gets a cell phone) he shares with a friend back home, a crazy optimist who sees him through some bad times. Before long, the book that I was reluctant to read had become the book I could hardly put down. There have been numerous accounts of new immigrants to Britain, notably Zadie Smith's WHITE TEETH and Monica Ali's BRICK LANE, but this is unusual in being seen from an Eastern European perspective. It is also unusual in that Lev never intends to stay in England. Even though he makes some very good friends in London (including a passionate lover), part of his thoughts remain with his family. The book thus becomes a sensitive study in love and loneliness, as the road home leads through some strange detours.

My one problem with the book is a certain inconsistency of tone. Tremain's realism tends to be grittier than life and her upbeats correspondingly more glowing; in this, she is a little like Dickens, a fabulist, a romantic at heart. Lev has some reversals, especially painful when they are his own stupid fault. But on the whole he is lucky, finding jobs in various aspects of the food business and employers perceptive enough to see his strengths. His discovery of good food is a revelation after a life of communist rations. As his skills increase, he takes pride in his new metier and uses it to share his joy with other people. Among these are the residents of a retirement home whose menus (written by his teenage assistant) he enlivens with dishes such as "Chef's fantastic fish gratin with zero bones and non-crap crumb." Despite its familiarity with the underside of London life, THE ROAD HOME eventually plays out as a kind of fable, with Lev as an unlikely Cinderella, whose good fortune comes to him by hard work and the slow emergence of qualities that were in him all the time. [4.5 stars]