The Road Home
Rose Tremain, 2007
Little, Brown & Co.
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316002622
Summary
In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev makes his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has already lost his family.
Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys—he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains, he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker, and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious friend Rudi, who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.
Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country—but can he really go home again?
Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in The Road Home, and her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1943
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Sorbonne, Paris; B.A., University of East Anglia
• Awards—James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Prix Fémina
Etranger, Whitbread Award, Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in East Anglia, UK
Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson in 1943 in London, the daughter of Viola (known as Jane) and Keith Thomson, a playwright.
She went to boarding school at Crofton Grange in Hertfordshire, an experience of which she later said in a Guardian interview, "It had all the horrors of boarding school— it was very cold and the food was disgusting. But the good thing about being sent away to school is that there’s a lot of what I would call dead time. You had to really use your own resources and what some of us did was to write our own plays and put them on. We starred in them, made the costumes, made the scenery, and it was thrilling."
After school she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then graduated with a degree in English from the University of East Anglia, where she later taught creative writing from 1988-1995.
She married Jon Tremain in 1971 and in 1972 had a daughter, Eleanor. Her second marriage was to the theatre director Jonathan Dudley. She now lives in East Anglia with the writer and biographer Richard Holmes.
Her first novel, Sadler’s Birthday, was published in 1976, and picked up by the editor Penelope Hoare, who later said, "I remember feeling utterly thrilled when I read it.... It was so unlike most people’s first novels, in the sense that it didn’t seem to be in the least bit autobiographical." Hoare has been Tremain’s editor ever since, working together on ten novels and several short story collections.
In the course of her writing career, Tremain has garnered a host of prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and the prestigious Prix Fémina Etranger, the Whitbread Novel Award, and several others. She has been nominated for the Booker and Orange Prize several times. She won the Orange Prize in 2008 for The Road Home. (Author bio from Chatto & Windus, a division of Random House, UK.)
Book Reviews
Journeys like Lev's are very much a part of Britain's present reality, with discussion of the Eastern European invasion appearing all over. But Tremain elevates the subject beyond its outlines by making Lev not a statistic or a caricature or the standard-bearer of a trend but simply a man—fully embodied, his ignoble and noble acts presented without exaggeration, without excessive praise or condemnation.... A less disciplined and agile author might have been tempted to ease Lev's transition from daydreamer to doer. Or she might have jollied Lev into a toque at London's River Cafe and set Rudi up as a chauffeur on Belisha Road. But Rose Tremain is in the business of inventing not so much fantasies as alternate realities.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times
Rose Tremain brings the full tone and range of her novelist's imagination to bear on Lev, giving him, besides his enduring and endearing grief, humour, a romantic temperament, a genius for intimate male friendship and a poets' eye for images.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
A classic work by the gifted Tremain.... She has the art of finding the improbable graces in human connection.
Guardian (UK)
This is a finely balanced novel of urgent humanity.... The Road Home should keep you gripped...and fraught with anxious sympathy.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
The pleasure, the wit and the joy in humanity that Tremain brings to every page do what literature, at its best, should do: connect us, as E.M. Forester famously exhorted.
Stacey D'Erasmo - Los Angeles Times
It's not difficult to see why author Rose Tremain won the Orange Prize—a prestigious British fiction award--for her latest novel, The Road Home. From page one, Tremain plunges readers deep into the journey of Lev, an immigrant from an unnamed Eastern European country.... An unexpected, poignant story.
Allecia Vermillion - Chicago Sun Times
Tremain transforms this episodic road story into a gem of a novel, driven by a memorable character whose caring and ambition move him from a difficult personal situation and damaging historical past toward a positive new life.
Robert Allen Papinchak - Seattle Times
Why do I love Rose Tremain? It's not just the clarity of her prose, the liveliness of her plots, the precision of her settings, or the depth of her characters. I love Tremain because she is so compassionate. Her novels exemplify this moral quality, even as they excel at all the others.
Susan Balee - Philadelphia Inquirer
Tremain's protagonists are often faced with trials that have a fabled quality...and her latest novel is no exception...At once timeless and bitingly contemporary, this novel explores the life now lived by millions—when one's hope lies in one country and one's heart in another.
The New Yorker
Tremain (Restoration) turns in a low-key but emotionally potent look at the melancholia of migration for her 14th book. Olev, a 42-year-old widower from an unnamed former east bloc republic, is taking a bus to London, where he imagines every man resembles Alec Guinness and hard work will be rewarded by wealth. He has left behind a sad young daughter, a stubborn mother and the newly shuttered sawmill where he had worked for years. His landing is harsh: the British are unpleasant, immigrants are unwelcome, and he's often overwhelmed by homesickness. But Lev personifies Tremain's remarkable ability to craft characters whose essential goodness shines through tough, drab circumstances. Among them are Lydia, the fellow expatriate; Christy, Lev's alcoholic Irish landlord who misses his own daughter; and even the cruelly demanding Gregory, chef-proprietor of the posh restaurant where Lev first finds work. A contrived but still satisfying ending marks this adroit emigre's look at London.
Publishers Weekly
A displaced European's Candide-like progress through contemporary London is charted in this ambitious novel from the Whitbread Award-winning British author (The Colour, 2003, etc.). The protagonist is Lev, a recently widowed and also jobless former sawmill worker. He has left his young daughter and his (also widowed) mother behind (in a generically economically disadvantaged country that is and isn't Poland), hoping to find work and send money home. Debarking from the Trans-Euro bus on which he meets a similarly down-at-heels countrywoman (Lydia, who'll re-enter Lev's new life at variously crucial moments), Lev acquires a fragile living working as a distributor of leaflets, as a dishwasher, and so on, slowly ascending the ladder of minimal solvency, making a painstaking adaptation to a society that seems, to his bemused view, inexplicably self-indulgent, pampered and unmotivated. While sticking close to Lev's roiling thought processes, Tremain simultaneously constructs a subtly detailed mosaic of personal and cultural distinctions and conflicts-notably in Lev's cautious approach to reclaiming a sex life (perhaps even a love life?) and in generously developed conversations between Lev and his fulsome Irish landlord, bibulous plumber and compulsive worrywart Christy Slane. The novel's texture is further enriched by lengthy flashbacks spun from Lev's wistful memories, which acquaint us more fully with his warmhearted late wife Marina and his best friend Rudi, a resourceful hustler whose busy head is filled with visions of all things American, and foolproof scams by which such riches may be acquired. Rudi is an ingenious comic counterpart to Candide's annoyingly optimistic mentor Pangloss, and the novel dances into vigorous life whenever he takes hold of it. Still, Lev offers readers ample reason to get lost in this immensely likable novel's many pleasures. One of the best from the versatile Tremain, who keeps on challenging herself, and rewarding readers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. "Through Lev’s eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success." (Edward Marriott, Observer)
Do you agree with Marriot’s assessment of how Lev views London, and do you feel Tremain paints a realistic picture?
2. In her author interview Rose Tremain says "I've deliberately built my fictions around characters who are distant from me, in gender, place or time—or all of these. The moment I get close to my own biography, I feel boredom (and even mild self-dislike) creeping up on me."
Does this reflect your own feelings as a reader? Do you prefer novels which reflect your own experiences or take you somewhere else? What do you think you have in common with Lev?
3. Food is a very important motif in the novel. How does Tremain illustrate Lev’s journey in terms of food? Why do you think she only begins to describe the food of his own country towards the end?
4. In the author interview Tremain says that in her view, "most Brits want to be welcoming to migrants, but have worries—or indeed extreme anxieties—of their own which sometimes prevent them from doing this."
Do you believe that is true in your country? What worries and anxieties do you think Tremain is referring to and how are these played out in the novel?
5. Have you ever lived in another country? If so, how far did your experiences reflect Lev’s? What did you find challenging about establishing a new life in a different culture? Did it affect the way you read the novel? If not, do you think you could ever do what Lev did? What would you find hardest to leave behind?
6. Lev’s relationship with Sophie becomes very dark when he turns violent towards her. Why do you think he has such difficult relationships with women?
7. In the end Lev returns to his family and builds a life with his new found skills and money. Why do you think that the novel has ended in such an idealistic way? Do you think that this ending is possible for immigrants?
(Questions issued by Chatto & Windus, a division of Random House, UK.)