In this fourth Lucy Barton instalment, Elizabeth Strout delivers arguably the best fictional depiction yet of how the events of the past two-and-a-half-years have and haven’t changed us 📙 maxjliu
Strout weaves in characters from across her fictional universe, including glimpses of Olive Kitteridge In the spring of 2020, when some literary critics predicted that the next few years would bring a raft of novels about the pandemic,The American writes the kind of realist fiction about timeless themes of family, marriage and ageing for which there will always be a readership, regardless of fashion. She is an unlikely candidate to take on epochal events as they unfold.
In Maine, they take their daily walks, watch the news, drink wine and find solace and annoyance in each other’s company. Their emotions fluctuate, in ways many people will recognise from lockdowns, with the desolation alleviated by small satisfactions, such as when Lucy finds a key piece in a jigsaw puzzle and thinks: “I am not unhappy.”
Occasionally, it feels too soon, samey and depressing to revisit that period. Strout, however, is wise to this risk. She intensifies the emotions and drama via the story of Lucy’s grown-up daughters, who both have their own marital difficulties, and Lucy’s fresh reflections on her harsh, poverty-stricken upbringing in Illinois: “My whole childhood was a lockdown.”
Lucy thinks about her late mother, as she does in every book, not because Strout is unimaginative or in her artistic comfort zone, but because their relationship never stops evolving in Lucy’s mind: “I did not know who she was, and I did not like who she had been. But she was my mother, and so some part of me had continued to believe things she had said.”
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