James Wood, in his absorbing “Coming and Going,” in this week’s issue, returns to an idea he introduced in his great essay “On Not Going Home” (London Review of Books, February 20, 2014), namely, “secular homelessness.” It’s a term that bugs me. It’s vague and inaccurate. The opposite of tragic homelessness isn’t secular; it’s non-tragic. Why define it in terms of its lack of religion? In “On Not Going Home,” Wood says, “What I have been describing, both in my own life and in the lives of others, is more like secular homelessness. It cannot claim the theological prestige of the transcendent.” Come on! Who thinks of refugee life in terms of “the theological prestige of the transcendent”? It’s an unreal analysis. In “Coming and Going,” a review of Sunjeev Sahota’s new novel China Room, he repeats it: But the narrator of “China Room,” for all his experience of gray, racist little Englanders, doesn’t inhabit a before and after in quite the same way. Born in England, the relatively fortunate child of immigrants who have already made their difficult journey, and have done so, in part, for him, he has no personal knowledge of before and after. He inhabits something closer to a kind of secular homelessness, shorn of the religious echo of exile.
But what about political and social echoes? Why focus on religion, or the lack thereof, as homelessness’s defining feature? Wood is obsessed with religion. I guess that’s the answer.
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