At one point, Lucy looks at a white police officer and wonders what he is thinking and feeling. 6 - all of these cataclysmic events are discussed by the novel’s characters, and their effects resound through the story, always in subtle and surprising ways. The murder of George Floyd, the 2020 presidential election, Jan. The intimacy Strout creates between narrator and reader is both comforting and challenging as she takes us into the human heart by which Lucy lives - its tenderness, its joys, and fears - and gives us thoughts too deep for tears. She shares with us feelings “hidden very deep inside” her and her “terrible private anguish” about her girls calling her less and “moving away from” her emotionally. “I am not proud to say this,” she prefaces one confession. We have the sense that Lucy is confiding in us, admitting to things she wouldn’t tell those closest to her, bringing her uncomfortable emotions, flaws, and less admirable actions to us with unsparing honesty. Strout provides all the back-stories and histories we’ll need, refreshing the memories of dedicated fans, deftly bringing new readers up to speed. Reuniting with familiar characters and stories is a pleasure “Lucy by the Sea” offers Strout stalwarts, but new readers will find the novel engrossing, too. Bob Burgess from “ The Burgess Boys” and “ Olive, Again” becomes a close friend and companion to Lucy Olive Kitteridge is mentioned several times. Gradually, breakthroughs occur, and Lucy achieves a “strange compatibility” with William.īeloved characters from Strout’s previous work make cameo appearances in all their thorny, complicated glory. William, Becka, and Chrissy, too, undergo moral and personal accountings. Startling revelations - her “whole childhood was a lockdown” - give her perspective both clarifying and terrifying. The pandemic prompts Lucy’s reckoning with the worth of her life, her career, her performance as a mother. Competent, take-charge William eventually arranges for them to leave the city, too, as determined to save their lives as he was Lucy’s. She can’t read or write, and finds herself exhausted yet unable to rest, irritated by William, and distraught with worry about their daughters, Becka and Chrissy, who both live in Brooklyn. She still grieves the loss of her second husband, David, a year earlier. She announces on that her “relationship with daughters will change in ways could never have anticipated,” that a close friend and a family member “will die of the virus,” that she will “never see apartment again,” that her “entire life … become something new.” The novel that follows is the story of how and why these events and losses and metamorphoses occur. Very early on, Lucy makes it clear that we will be reading about a radically transformative epoch in her life. In its emotional heft and honesty, its ability to go fearlessly to the darkest places, its pellucid empathy and its spot-on rendering of the pandemic experience for both individuals and the country, it is perhaps the best of the four marvelous novels Strout has written featuring Lucy Barton. Less than a year after the third book in what has come to be known as the Amgash series, “ Oh William!,” was published to great acclaim, Elizabeth Strout is back with a new installment, “ Lucy by the Sea.” The title’s buoyant coziness is belied by the book’s unflinching account of 60-something writer Lucy Barton’s life during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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