A book is justified by its quality, not its subject. Home/Land...does not falter by virtue of belonging to the reviled species of memoir; rather, it flails because it is insufficiently interested in the external world. Despite its many arresting images and diverting anecdotes, it reads like a very smart person’s very well-written diary ... Home/Land has no...through-line, and it can be maddeningly discursive as a result ... Nominally, Home/Land chronicles her move from New York to London, but in reality, it is as hard to say where the book is set as it is to say what, exactly, it is about. The text ricochets from reporting to recollection and from past to present ... Though Home/Land advertises its interest in its author’s alienation from the country of her birth, it is so densely peppered with interludes that it seems to be composed almost entirely of asides ... In fairness, Mead’s prose is so dexterous that it can be difficult to summon the will to fault her. She has an exacting eye and a gift for trenchant phrasing ... But for all of her careful attention to the subjects she sketches with such exquisite detail, Mead is often ham-handedly insensitive to political context ... If Home/Land is often pleasant to read, it is because Mead’s writing is locally absorbing. And if we sometimes have the impression that the book is outward-looking, it is because so many of Mead’s digressions amount to piquant micro-articles about the history of London or New York. In the end, however, the memoir’s connective tissue is ineluctably personal: The random assortment of places and persons it treats can be unified only in terms of their meaning for Mead ... Reading a book driven by the sort of personal fortuity that propels Home/Land is like listening to someone recount a dream whose urgency is available only to the dreamer. Home/Land is a casualty not of its genre but of its impregnable inwardness.
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