But the halting, dissociated quality of her voice works superbly in a story that’s also a Covid narrative, where the existential threat to her is, this time, also distressingly universal.Īs the novel begins, we’re again reminded that Lucy suffers from complex PTSD stemming from her upbringing. Does Lucy catch the virus? Reader, she doesn’t. It’s also, unusually for Strout, a book about topical issues, for this “now” includes the recent past and the three years of the pandemic, bringing Lucy’s memoir-writing up to date in real time. Lucy by the Sea follows the pattern of the earlier novels by revisiting the incidents of Lucy’s girlhood as she tries to understand the person she is now. It was followed by Anything is Possible (2017), a volume of interlocking stories approaching the Barton family history from different angles, and by a second novel, Oh William! (2021), which revealed more about Lucy’s failed first marriage, and which has since been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Lucy’s elliptical account of her impoverished post-war childhood in Amgash, Illinois, hinted at far more than it said: physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, extreme isolation, and the lingering consequences into adulthood of early trauma. Elizabeth Strout first acquainted us with Lucy Barton, her fictional novelist, in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016).
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