March 6, 2023

Rereading Lucy Barton

This is a post about a lot of things. It’s about being wrong, and dismissing certain ideas and ways of being, and the question of how one knows what’s good, all of which are actually themes of Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton books, which begins with My Name is Lucy Barton, and continues with the story collection Anything is Possible, Oh, William, and, finally, Lucy By the Sea.

I first read My Name is Lucy Barton in 2016 and, if you’ll recall, I did not like it. I wrote, “I bought the book in hardback, paid $30+ for it and felt I’d paid a lot of money for something slight and unfinished. Which was inherent to the project, I supposed, but I was never able to quite figure out how, or what the point was, or why this wasn’t a novel proper.” At the time, I’d also noted that the book was short enough, however, that maybe I’d go back and read it again…but I didn’t. Even with the subsequent books, I was willing to let Lucy Barton go. But then the books started to be awfully celebrated, appearing on book lists, readers I admire a great deal declaring their love for them, and so this winter I decided to try them again. (No big chore either, they’re all very short!)

And I’ve got to tell you that everything I thought was weird and slight about the Lucy Barton novels is still right there. The downright unfashionableness of the project too, the quiet, the earnestnes, so many exclamation marks!! (!!). Telling, not showing. She’s breaking all the rules I know of how to write a novel well, and it’s my immediate instinct to dismiss these books again. I’m only considering them again because other people are telling me that they’re good, instead of me knowing that in my bones. And isn’t that everything we’re advised against as readers, as critics, as humans? Of following the crowd, reading like sheep?

I fervently believe that so much of what we regard as literary criticism is actually a matter of taste, and I also know that it takes all sorts, and books would be very boring if there were only one kind of book. Other people love books I loathe, and vice versa, and that’s precisely what gives books, and life, and the world, its flavour.

But still, to remain open. This is the object, I think. To stay curious. To look backwards and wonder if there is something you might have missed, some part of the puzzle you might have failed to understand.

What I missed about the Lucy Barton books in the first place is that I don’t think Strout was trying to write the novel as I know it anyway. (Similarly in her celebrated Olive Kitteridge, which was less a collection of linked stories [though it was also that] than an attempt to show the multitudinous of humanity and the universe, and the fundamental unknowability of another human being.) Strout’s books are less an exercise in narrative than one of character, and its variable layers, and the connections between them, and between places, ideas, and things,

Such as that Bob Burgess, who Lucy Barton meets Lucy By the Sea, has his own book, Strout’s 2013 novel The Burgess Boys, which I’ve just put on hold at the library. Or that Olive Kitteridge herself shows up, secondhand, in Lucy By the Sea, in conversations Lucy has with the cleaner from Olive’s apartment building. Or even just the way that one paragraph leads to another, leaping back and forth across time, between focusses and ideas, almost a randomness to their pattern—which had been my impression when I first read My Name is… back in 2016. When I hadn’t known enough to trust that I was in the literary hands of somebody I could trust.

“One of the reasons I believe this memory to be true is, first of all, it was so strange.” —Lucy by the Sea

It is the strangeness, and seeming randomness, of the Lucy Barton books that has me having real difficulty understanding it as fiction, has me struggling to believe that it is not true. Because the strangeness is so lifelike, as opposed to the constructedness of a literary narrative, the sense that a fictional world has to make, or so I assume—and Elizabeth Strout does no such thing.

I had a hard time with with Lucy by the Sea, a novel beginning in March 2020 and set against the unfolding pandemic, which is to say that it got into my head and tapped into my own pandemic (small t) trauma in such a visceral way. I also loved it and found it riveting, because any work of art that can so effectively tap into one’s nervous system is a wondrous thing, but it was upsetting to live that story again, to recall the fear and uncertainty, how dire things were, which is easy to forget now that we’re so much farther down the road.

It’s a novel (like all the others, and Olive too) about relatability, about what happens when we think we know when we don’t, about the limits (maybe?) of understanding people whose life experiences have been different from our own. Or about the ways that knowing and being known can be a burden—Lucy’s relationship to her sister, or even her own daughters, who—she realizes—remain at a remove from her because their own sadness affects her too much.

Books like the Lucy Barton books are never finished, there is no THE END. As Lauren Leblanc writes, “Like in any relationship, there are times in reading these books when certain stories demand attention, and there are times when personal moments are concealed or suppressed. There is inherent pleasure in that mystery. Her books read like familiar friends: complicated, timeless, achingly human, and compassionate.”

Elizabeth Strout doesn’t write novels so much as chart constellations, connecting points of light, moments of grace.