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.
William takes command when he sees the pandemic coming. He rents a house on the coast of Maine and hurries Lucy out of her beloved New York. “Maybe just a few weeks,” he lies, firmly putting her computer in the car while she insists that for this brief spell she’ll only need an iPad. “What are those?” Lucy asks in disbelief, seeing his plastic gloves for use at the petrol pump. “Don’t worry about it,” he repeats, and this is how they go on. William continues uncommunicatively in his self-appointed task of saving Lucy’s life. Lucy goes where she is put, resisting engagement in a way that is hard to fathom until we understand how deeply it is connected with grief for her second husband, and separation from the city they shared.
“It’s funny the things we remember, even when we think we are not remembering well any more.” The novel takes the shape of Lucy’s remembering. What can she recover from these months? She is not like one of Joseph Conrad or Ford Madox Ford’s narrators, ranging back and forth over time, circling and returning to events. She makes a chronicler’s progress, but unseen, unspoken and forgotten things are part of her subject. Shafts of childlike love and hate come back from the first days in Maine: irritable hatred of jigsaws and the borrowed house; love of the sea. “I thought: This is the sea!” Slowly (it was “weirdly slow”), knowledge of the situation makes its way into her; moments of sudden insight build to a larger comprehension. There are incidents that Lucy cannot forget and which she lays before us, in a confession that asks no forgiveness. She did not swap her place in a grocery queue with an elderly man. She could have done the right thing, and she didn’t. It’s a test or a parable, a vignette with the quality of an old woodcut, inescapable in its simplicity. And it’s uncannily true to the sharp outlines of so many discrete and freighted pandemic encounters.
Like Oh William!, this is a study of a later-life reunion between a man and woman who married in their 20s. William is hard to like, and Lucy’s acceptance of him requires our attentive reflection. Strout refuses the easy satisfactions of a tender tale, though she is deeply interested in what these people can give each other. Lucy by the Sea is also about a mother and her grown-up children. They are phoning in crisis or, worse, not phoning. “Oh dear God did I miss those girls.” Their news of pregnancies, of break-ups, brings overwhelming joy and distress. Lucy’s worry, amplified by lockdown, rises in tides so strong that it keeps them away. Under it all runs Lucy’s own loveless childhood, locked down with abusive parents in Amgash, Illinois. The conversations and silences with her mother in My Name Is Lucy Barton, and with her siblings in Anything Is Possible, are refracted now in conversations with her daughters. On the airy clifftop porch we are a long way from Lucy’s beginnings, but Strout is as concerned as ever with legacies of fear and inhibition, with “what we came from”, and what is passed on.
Each of these books is complete in itself. The relationships between them are remarkable, but would be just as compelling if one read the Lucy sequence in reverse. I’m a little more doubtful about Strout’s insistence that all her novels chart the same fictional world, with characters liable to reappear at any moment. Lucy and William’s borrowed house is outside Crosby, a town where we know the neighbours. Bob Burgess, whose family history was told in The Burgess Boys, now becomes a central figure. We hear, at one remove, about an old woman called Olive Kitteridge telling wicked stories in a retirement home nearby. It’s a self-reflexivity that sometimes pulls against the translucent prose and reminds us of the overseeing author. But that author has much to show us about pasts that keep returning, and lives that go on whether we’re watching or not.
Lucy’s account of her own experience is studded with the stories of others – people she has got to know in Maine, or merely overheard. In a way that recalls the structural craftsmanship of Willa Cather, Strout opens the space for these separate tales. The manner of it seems so artless, almost awkward, that you hardly realise what she’s doing until the force of it has knocked you sideways.
The novel centres on people lucky enough to isolate themselves and turn from the TV news to watch the sea, but there’s little complacency here. William’s daily walk to a second world war watchtower (one of the series of towers obliquely signalling across Strout’s fiction) becomes an act of ritual witness as he reflects on dire history and the dangerous present. Lucy makes a quiet, careful friendship with Trump-supporting Charlene and keeps trying to think across divides. Tiny scenes of social tension are enough to flood her with the knowledge that there is “deep, deep unrest in the country”. As a writer, as a woman, her instinct is to imagine her way into other lives. But when she writes the story of a white policeman, loving the man she creates in her fiction, she holds back from publication. Empathy can go wrong in this febrile culture. “Mostly I couldn’t trust myself: to know what to do these days.”
Clarity of perception alternates with doubt in a way that readers may recognise as vividly as the routines of bumped elbows, amateur hairdressing and DIY home plumbing. Catching in the very rhythm of narration the pressures of 2020, letting us listen as Lucy tries to make sense of relationships in lockdown and political tensions deepening across the country, Strout has written another wondrously living book, as fine a pandemic novel as one could hope for.
• Lucy By the Sea by Elizabeth Strout is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
