Book: Lucy By The Sea

Author: Elizabeth Strout

Publisher: Random House

Price: $28

Lucy Barton first seeped into our lives when Elizabeth Strout introduced her as the protagonist of My Name is Lucy Barton. As we follow her life through the novels serialising it, we see how the order of events is mixed up with no clear chronological precision. This is probably the most heart-warming feature of Strout’s narratives. In her calm and slightly laid-back manner of reporting, she reflects on the ways in which the mind and human recollection really work — they cannot be contained neatly in a list with time stamps that are in order of occurrence. Strout’s latest addition to the series is Lucy by the Sea, which touches the heart in a way that few others do.

Yet, we cannot help but feel a mild irritation at Lucy’s naive ignorance of the crisis surrounding her, as she reluctantly leaves for Maine with William. Unable to mirror the suppressed tension she senses in him, she notes the gloves and surgical masks he takes with them and wonders why. The irritation soon dissipates as we realise that all of us had been in the same place as her when the pandemic started to spread. Somewhat forced into a life with her erstwhile partner, Lucy reacts to his habits, his nature, and his appearance unkindly. Observing Crosby, Lucy remarks, “You could see that the town was pretty in a certain way, if you care for such things. I do not.” We are made familiar, once again, with the woman who abandoned her siblings for seventeen long years before she reunited with them in Anything is possible. Most of these reactions are not voiced but we can feel in her a need to reject this unfamiliar, new life so different from the polished and sophisticated one in New York. Soon, after she is abreast with the calamity, she tries to settle and before the book ends we find she has accepted her reality, age, and shared life with William.

The poignancy with which Lucy quietly observes the people around her is palpable. She hates the house that William has chosen for them to stay in because she “hate[d] the smell of other people’s lives”; she judges Bob Burgess for not meeting them in person even as William remarks he thinks they are “toxic” because they have come from New York where the pandemic had already become a wildfire. She repeatedly reports her unhappiness and when she learns of the death of her colleague, Elsie Waters; Lucy wants to cry but cannot. She mourns for her dead husband, David, as William is “in mourning for [his] life”. She frets about her daughters, is distressed when she learns that the marriage of her younger daughter, Becka, is breaking, and worries for the elder Chrissy after she loses her second pregnancy. That word, ‘hate’, is emphatically hurled again when William finds an old puzzle and sets it up to spend the time. She says, “I hate this kind of thing,” to which he replies, “Lucy, we’re in lockdown, stop hating everything.”

Strout’s expert inclusion of ugly as well as pleasant truths that changed so many families during the endless months of lockdown along with her keen comments about the deep and innate facets of human behaviour makes it impossible to put down Lucy by the Sea despite its sluggish pace. The sloth is familiar though: it echoes the way in which life moved during the lockdown. Having no choice, Lucy takes this in her stride. She, too, starts taking walks like William to complete her five thousand steps in each spell. Her initial disregard for Bob transforms into love and friendship and, soon, he joins her on these walks, finding in her a companion with whom he can be himself. When the slowness of her life makes Lucy feel she is losing her mind, her friends, Bob Burgess and Charlene Bibber, offer her solace by asserting falsely that they too felt the same way.

The narrative is broken intermittently with moments of action and surges of emotion, like when they rush to Connecticut to save their children from being exposed to the virus by a man who refuses to accept reality (much like Lucy in the beginning); when William bonds with his half-sister, Lois, and finally feels he is no longer alone; when Chrissy is convinced shortly after an impassioned speech from her mother to give her marriage a chance.

Strout inserts delightful snatches from her other novels, seamlessly binding Lucy with her previously-created characters like Bob Burgess and Olive Kitteridge. Despite her struggle to come to terms with the lifeless Grand Central station (picture), the closed shops, and the bare streets of New York, she finds happiness at last. Her daughters seem happy and William, for the first time in the decades she has known him, says, “I love you, Lucy Barton, for whatever it’s worth.”