The Lucy Barton Books
Since the publication of her 2009 Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (or for some even before then), readers have recognized the understated brilliance of American novelist Elizabeth Strout. Something in her sparse writing makes readers feel seen; their life experience, or the life experience of those they have loved looms large, mirrored through her written word. There is unquestionably a magic at work here. I recently read Strout’s Lucy Barton novels, which begin with My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and includes Oh William! (2021) and Lucy By The Sea (2022); a subtle bluntness mixed with Strout’s masterful use of voice in each novel create a compelling mirror of our time, our society, our individual struggles. There is a fourth Lucy Barton book, Anything Is Possible (2017), that I have not yet read.
The slender first-person novel, My Name is Lucy Barton (it is under 200 pages), is the account of titular character Lucy Barton. Herself a writer, Lucy pieces together memories of her coming-of-age amidst an exceedingly difficult childhood. My Name is Lucy Barton is Lucy’s life story (to a point) told in her own words, looking back. In addition to her childhood, the novel includes a serious illness, her calling toward the creative life and the world of letters, and her marriage to William, the father of her two daughters. The genius of My Name is Lucy Barton is its brevity and Strout’s ability to pierce the human condition in a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph at most. It is startling, breathtaking; and compulsively readable. In fact, I read this slight novel in a few short sittings over the course of a day and a half.
My Name is Lucy Barton deals with a host of heavy-hitting twentieth-century hardships: poverty, neglect, the traumas inherited in families on both sides of WWII’s conflict. It touches on the great loss during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. There is even mention made to the horror of the Twin Towers and the destruction of 9-11. In the memories Lucy shares, self-consciously and intentionally selected for her reader, she considers craft and story. At the heart of Lucy’s story is the story of all daughters and all mothers, perhaps. It is a love story fraught with sadness and distance and all the things we cannot know about the women in our lives whom we hold most dear, or perhaps whom we resent most fiercely—our mothers.
Despite its treatment of life’s many traumas, My Name is Lucy Barton is playfully meta-fictional and Lucy’s voice is refreshingly honest and approachable. . As the narrative is Lucy’s own, there are plenty of moments that draw attention to the craft of the novel itself or more generally the ways one ought to write. As a result, My Name is Lucy Barton is a perfect book for writers. Strout’s concise prose, her playfulness, and the voice she creates for Lucy are all clever and inspiring. In case any reader has failed to miss the life affirming tone of My Name is Lucy Barton, Strout leaves her reader with perhaps the best last line I’ve read in some time: “All life amazes me” (MNILB, 191). Four simple words, and Strout’s novel concludes in a calm smile.
Lucy’s first-person narrative continues with the second novel in this series, Oh William! but the focus shifts, centering on issues in William’s life, albeit through Lucy’s voice. In Oh William! readers meet Lucy again as an aging woman. My Name is Lucy Barton centers on Lucy’s relationship with her mother, at least in part; Oh William! investigates William’s mother: her personal history and secrets, Lucy’s and William’s relationships with her. Themes of parenting adult children and grief loom large in Oh William!. Likewise, Oh William! explores the unsettling experience of learning things that turn what we think we know about our lives upside down. An experience to which we are, all of us, at any age, vulnerable. Even as they age, Lucy and William have much to learn through the humbling and difficult things life throws their way. Lest Oh William!’s brilliance is not evident here; let me conclude by saying this was one of the shortlist finalists for the Mann Booker 2022 award (along with titles like Small Things Like These and Treacle Walker).
Strout concludes the Lucy Barton books with her most recent, Lucy By The Sea (2022). This book continues, more or less, where Oh William! leaves off, but the world has shifted dramatically as coronavirus pandemic emerges. Lucy By The Sea is the first work of fiction I have read set during the early days of pandemic lockdown and I applaud Strout’s treatment of the subject. Lucy By The Sea continues to develop themes of parenting adult children, facing one’s own mortality, and embracing love in all its complicated forms. Like the previous novels, the story unfurls in first-person from Lucy’s point of view. Lucy By The Sea is also, of course, includes plenty of the myriad psychological responses to COVID-19; reactions we all will recognize.
Of the three novels, I liked Lucy By The Sea the most. I loved watching Lucy and William age, gracefully and otherwise. Strout continues the hopeful honesty begun in My Name is Lucy Barton and continued in Oh William!. What’s more, Lucy By The Sea includes plenty of Strout’s home state of Maine, a setting introduced in Oh William!; and I thoroughly enjoyed this element as well. All three novels, however, are excellent. Their succinctness is moving; Lucy’s voice is as compelling as the recognizable human experiences she relates.
The Lucy Barton trilogy is many things, but perhaps most noticeable from the first pages, it is very readable. The simplicity of these books can be deceiving though; they touch on many, many heavy themes. At the center of all three are fundamental truths about being human. Of all the tributaries of thought and experience relayed in these books, I continued to see life’s great paradox at work; we cling to community and yet we ultimately walk the world alone. Regardless, life abounds with hope, connection, and love, if we are astute enough to recognize it.
Bibliography:
Strout, Elizabeth. My Name is Lucy Barton. Random House: 2016.
--- Oh William! Random House: 2021.
--- Lucy By The Sea. Random House: 2022.
A Few Great Passages:
“This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation” (MNILB, 14).
“[T]hat is when I learned work gets done if you simply do it. I could see the logic of my homework assignments in a way I could not if I did my work at home” (MNILB, 23-24).
“Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that’s what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker” (MNILB, 83).
“I have said it before: It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down” (MNILB, 95).
“Never ever defend your work. This is a story about love, you know that. This is story of a man who has been tortured every day of his life for things he did in the war. This is the story of a wife who stayed with him, because most wives did in that generation, and she comes to her daughter’s hospital room and talks compulsively about everyone’s marriage going bad, she doesn’t even know it, doesn’t even know what’s what she’s doing. This is a story about a mother who loves her daughter. Imperfectly. Because we all love imperfectly. But if you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece, remember this: You’re not doing it right” (MNILB, 107).
“If there is weakness in your story, address it head-on, take it in your teeth and address it, before the reader really knows. This is where you will get your authority” (MNILB, 135).
“You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one” (MNILB, 146).
“When I taught writing—which I did for many years—I talked about authority. I told the students that what was most important was the authority they went to the page with. [. . .] We crave authority. We do. No matter what anyone says, we crave that sense of authority. Of believe that in the presence of this person we are safe” (OW! 132)
“‘Once every so often—at the very most—I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise we’re following something—we don’t even know what it is but we follow it’” (OW! 154)
“It made me gasp inside to think of her as that old; it made me deeply sad, the way we get sad to imagine our children very old, the idea of their vibrant powerful faces gone pale and papery, their limbs stiff, their time over, and our not being there to help them – (Unthinkable, but this will happen.)” (OW! 212).
“And I also understood: Grief is a private thing. God, is it a private thing” (LBTS 46).
“I need to say: Even as all this [COVID lockdowns] went on, even with the knowledge that my doctor had said it would be a year, I still did not . . . I don’t know how to say it, but my mind was having trouble taking things in. It was as though each day was like a huge stretch of ice I had to walk over. And in the ice were small trees struck there and twigs, this is the only way I can describe it, as though the world had become a different landscape and I had to make it through each day without knowing when it would stop, and it seemed it would not stop, and so I felt a great uneasiness” (LBTS 60).
“I had what almost felt like a vision: that there was deep, deep unrest in the country and that the whisperings of a civil war seemed to move around me like a breeze I could not quite feel but could sense” (LBTS 166).
“My point is, if we are lucky we bounce into someone. But we always bounce away again, at least a little” (LBTS 186).
