Elizabeth Strout is writing masterpieces at a pace you might not suspect from their spaciousness and steady beauty. Last year she published Oh William!, which is on the 2022 Booker prize shortlist. In it, her much-loved narrator Lucy Barton returns tentatively to the company of her first husband, William, thinking all the while about empathy, loneliness and her lifelong sense of invisibility. Now Lucy by the Sea picks up the story, but there is a virus spreading and we are at the dawn of a changed world.
“I don’t know how to say it,” Lucy hesitates, thinking back to the early weeks of the pandemic, “but my mind was having trouble taking things in.” Here is Lucy’s voice again, the voice that first held readers rapt in Strout’s 2016 My Name Is Lucy Barton. Yet it is also oddly unfamiliar. Lucy is vague and detached in ways that make her strange, not least to herself. “My mind was having trouble,” she says, as if her mind were separate from herself, and so she feels it to be throughout the disorienting stretches of an unknowable year.
