Lucy By the Sea
Elizabeth Strout’s novel begins with William Barton visiting his ex-wife in NYC as the COVID-19 epidemic begins. He insists on moving her from her comfortable Manhattan flat to a coastal Maine home to wait things out.
For several months it’s just Lucy and William living together by the sea renewing their friendship. They become close again and receive cautious visits from their grown children Lucy makes new friends in their seaside community of Crosby, Maine. William takes on a teaching position at the local university and pays a visit to a long-lost relative he came close to meeting in Oh, William! _ There’s even a cameo of Olive Kitteridge.
Lucy’s inner dialogue touches on many truths from its time. Here’s one standout line:
And then this thought went through my mind: We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through.
Or this remarkable passage of really being Lucy by the sea, which reminded me so much of summer vacations in Hancock Point, Maine, when I was young, and how the relation of water and sky colors I can often relate to when looking out over Victoria Harbour with one profound difference: the tides. The immensity of the scale of the city’s architecture and the depth of the harbor with no visable shoreline mean that only the fishermen right at the edge of the walkway that runs parallel to the harbor likely know when the tide is high. In Maine the receding tide meant food for scavenging gulls would become visible and easily had. The seaweed would drape itself along the rocky shelves of black volcanic rock, where it formed pools with trapped shellfish, crabs and—albeit rarely—a sea urchin.
Thus far there are four novels about Lucy Barton as of now, inclusive of the present one, plus: My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, and Oh, William!
Related
- Inherent Vice — 15 Oct '09
- Olive Kitteridge — 12 Jan '10
- American Pastoral — 27 Mar '10