This is the most pandemic-focused pandemic novel I’ve read so far. In other books (like Dayswork, The Sentence, Summer) the pandemic was part of the story, but it was more like background: in Lucy by the Sea, it’s front and center. Strout’s novel is about a writer who is semi-recently widowed, and whose first (ex)-husband, a doctor, persuades her to move to Maine to shelter in place with him as pandemic lockdown begins. The book is mainly about her relationship with various people — the ex-husband, their daughters, the people in town that she gets to know from a distance. But of course, it is also about that year of lockdown, and so it’s sort of uncanny to read, because it’s such recent history yet also just far enough back that it feels like the past.
The most interesting, and I think effective, thing about the novel is the odd temporality. It’s narrated day-to-day (with some big jumps) but also clearly retrospectively, with some level of dramatic irony — “I did not know then,” says the narrator. But also, “I understood” — this is a repeated refrain, I understood ________, I understood that she was trying to tell me this, or that he was upset, and what’s so fascinating to me about it is that in its regular invocation, it comes to represent the limitations of individual knowledge, rather than something known. That is, when the narrator says I understood that x, what it said to me was This was what I was aware of or recognized at the time, not, This is how things were. It’s a really interesting way to signal limitations of historical awareness, which is especially effective for this particular event.
But meanwhile, it should be noted: Elizabeth Strout writes books that are somehow incredibly comforting. Not cozy, exactly, but… wholesome? There’s a very pleasurable plainspoken matter-of-factness about them, which is not to say that they lack complexity, but that they feel even-keeled, pleasant, while also being thought-provoking. It’s funny, because I think one of the things people enjoy about her books is that they are part of one shared world, so characters from one book pop up in another (it’s like the Marvel Universe, except it’s New England retirees), but although I remember really enjoying Olive Kittredge when I read it, I remember absolutely nothing about the book, and so the mention of her in this one wasn’t especially exciting to me. When I went back to my old blog to see what I’d said about it, I discovered a post I had written on Lucy Barton, which is certainly the same Lucy from Lucy by the Sea, and also: no memory of it at all. I guess there are at least three other books of hers with these same people in them, but I’m not sure I have an especially strong urge to work my way through them? But I can readily imagine that I might really appreciate them if I were feeling especially overtaxed or depressed — it’s nice to know that they’ll be there waiting for me when I need them.
Kasia Reads 