Strout unfolds Lucy’s life in vignettes from her past and future filled with reflections and uncertainties. Despite her eventual success, Lucy feels untethered, quick to love those who are kind to her, constantly looking at others to see how she should behave. She’s a woman who never learnt how to be in the world, a child whose parents taught her nothing, carefully avoiding revealing their own pain in words while conveying it in their inability to express their love to their children. Lucy reports on the poverty and neglect – both emotional and physical – which singled her out as a child, exposing her to mockery in small-town Illinois. There’s a passage in the book in which an author tells Lucy that ‘her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do’ which sums up Strout’s own writing beautifully for me. Written in impressionistic episodes, Lucy’s narrative flits backwards and forwards through her life exploring her relationship with her mother and the effects of a childhood bereft of affection. The next time Lucy sees her mother, nine years later, she will be close to death and Lucy will be a successful writer. Her father is left unmentioned by both of them until her mother leaves, and then only briefly. Her mother stays for six days – bolting when it appears that Lucy may need surgery – filling their time together telling stories about people Lucy once knew all of whom seem to have suffered unhappiness in their marriages. Lucy has not seen her mother since she took her prospective husband home many years ago. After four weeks of boredom, loneliness and isolation she wakes up one morning to find her mother sitting opposite her bed. Lucy looks back on the nine weeks she spent in hospital over thirty years ago when a simple appendix removal resulted in an illness which resisted both diagnosis and cure. There’s much to think about in this slim novel in which the eponymous Lucy records her life, full of reflections, memories and ambiguities. If you’ve come across that already, you’ll know that her writing can be dark and so it is with My Name is Lucy Barton. That may be less true than it was with the release of HBO’s fine adaptation of Olive Kitteridgea few years back. My proof copy’s jacket proclaims her ‘the greatest American writer you’ve never heard of’. I’ve felt that way about Elizabeth Strout’s writing for some time. Sometimes you want to tell everyone you know just how good an author is, press their books into as many hands as possible.
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