("Praise seems unable to enter me," she comments.) With the benefit of hindsight, she marvels at how out of it she was, how little she understood at the start of the pandemic. Lucy is honest and self-deprecating to a fault. (Unbeknownst to Bob, one of William's many adulterous affairs was with his first wife.) Among the pleasures of Strout's fictional world is the way characters from earlier books - like Bob, and Olive Kitteridge - keep turning up, sometimes in cameo roles.Īnother pleasure is Lucy's distinctive, plain-spoken narrative voice, which reads as if she were talking to a new friend she's decided to take into her confidence. An old friend, Bob Burgess, has found them a rental house on the coast. He urges their two grown daughters to flee New York City with their husbands, and instructs Lucy to grab what she needs and shelter with him in Maine. In March 2020, while Lucy is distracted by an upcoming book tour, William, a parasitologist, has been tracking the encroaching deadly new coronavirus with growing alarm. Although Lucy and William had remained friendly after their divorce, they saw more of each other that lonely year - including a trip to Maine to try to contact a half-sister William had only recently learned about on an ancestry website.īook Reviews Lucy Barton returns - and reconnects with an old love - in 'Oh William!' Lucy, who overcame a traumatic, impoverished childhood in Amgash, Illinois, to become a writer celebrated for her empathic novels about have-nots and outcasts, was recently widowed William's vivacious third wife had left him, taking their young daughter with her. When we last checked in on Lucy in Oh William! (which was just shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize), she and her first husband were both newly, unhappily single. In Lucy By the Sea, Elizabeth Strout's fourth novel since 2016 about writer Lucy Barton, we find the hyper-sensitive and supremely sympathetic heroine at sea, awash in confusion as her world - and the world - changes drastically, seemingly overnight. Oh Lucy! What were you thinking, fleeing the comfortable Manhattan apartment you shared with your late, doting second husband to ride out the pandemic with your philandering ex in a remote seaside cabin in Maine?
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