Lucy by the Sea

 

I finished reading Lucy by the Sea, the 4th in the Amgash series by Elizabeth Strout, nearly 3 weeks ago and am just now finding the time to update the blog. Of the four novels in the series, I definitely loved this one the most.

The first three are:
My Name is Lucy Barton is about Lucy's relationship with her mother and about her upbringing
Anything is Possible follows up on characters introduced in My Name is Lucy Barton and their relationships to Lucy
Oh William! delves into the continued connection between Lucy and William

Lucy by the Sea is a current novel about pandemic living. I found so much to relate to in this novel. William spirits Lucy away from New York City at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic up to rural Maine. Being so isolated up there (mostly together, just talking long walks apart from each other), Lucy is able to take the quiet time to reflect on her life. She struggles with the distance between her and the daughters she has left behind in New York City. She deals with the deaths of people she knows from Covid-19. She makes some new friends. Her relationship with William needs to be redefined.

I live in a rural area and was home and very much isolated for many months at the start of Covid. Just like Lucy.

I escaped into reading while being stuck home so much, similar to William. Lucy, who can't concentrate enough to read, finds William's ability to read confounding.

Lucy and I would contemplate the mask wearing or non-mask wearing of every person we encountered.

Lucy meets a black woman who tells Lucy "You don't want to be a Black woman alone on some desolate road down here." Yes, this story takes place in Maine. But move it to rural Florida and you can substitute "Yankee" for Black woman. Well, you get the idea.

Lucy reflects upon how your kids grow up without you really realizing. Like you can never know the last time you've picked up your child. I can totally relate to that. Isn't that a thought every parent has? And the missing of your kids so desperately just because you know you can't see them.

Hours turned into days turned into weeks turned into months without much division in the time periods. Something I thought about a lot during Covid is something that Lucy reflects upon.

When my husband would suggest we go for a ride, I was rarely game. I mean, what's the point of being a passenger in a car just driving around when there's nothing beautiful to see and no place where you're comfortable getting out of the car to walk around. William suggests a drive to L.L. Bean, even if they don't have to go in. Just the drive there and Lucy was willing. She was always willing to go anywhere because there was so little to do.

Many of my fears were similar to Lucy's fears. I could not stop feeling that life as I had known it was gone. And neither one of us had imagined a retirement like what we ended up with. I thought of how my life had become so different from what I had ever imagined for myself during these - my last - years. Wow!

I remember the relief of getting my second vaccine in 2021. Thinking that perhaps life would go back to something I'd consider a new normal. And then I had both my vaccines, three weeks apart. When the woman put the needle into my arm for the second shot, I almost wept. I thought: I am free. I thought: I will see New York again. I have yet to see New York City again. That's coming. But I did get to see my kids shortly after that second vaccine.

Lucy deals with the state of the country. How they're dealing with Covid. And the impact of January 6th on Lucy's physique. She's full of questions and thoughts as was I. Never did I expect those two events to be stories I'd follow in my lifetime. And at the same time?

The one thing that I could not relate to at all was the thought of having to spend lockdown isolated anywhere with my ex-husband. That would never ever happen. Thank goodness!

Do I recommend this novel? I realize that some people are ready to read about Covid-19, some are not yet ready to read about. And some will never care to read about it. If you recall, in the early days of Covid I wondered on here about "the novel about covid." How would it end? Who would tell the story? I never sat down and got pen to paper. But if I had written my story, it would have been very similar to Lucy by the Sea.

Oh William!

I'm not sure why the rush to read thru all the Elizabeth Strout novels in the Amgash Series which started with My Name is Lucy Barton. Oh William! is the third in the series. (I've got Lucy by the Sea on hold at the library. The wait is fairly long.)

Oh William! picks up the story after years when Lucy and William have been divorced a long time. William is on his third wife and Lucy's second husband has recently died. I guess I was sort of confounded as to how - or why - Lucy and William maintained the relationship that they still have after all these years. But that's part of my personal perspective and my history with my ex-husband. Lucy does explain it several times by saying that William always made her feel safe and sort of grounded. 

As Lucy is now alone, she has more time to think about William's other relationships and the marriages that her daughters are in. She also thinks a lot about William's mother, Catherine. In the novel, we get to learn a lot more about Catherine's history: who she was before she became William's mother. Really, what do we know of our parents before they were our parents? And how often do we really think about them in that way?

Of the three books in the series that I've read so far, I definitely connected much more to Oh William! than the other two. Perhaps because in the novel, Lucy is nearly my age. She's dealing with an (long ago) divorce, an ex-husband, adult daughters with struggles of their own. Oh William! was an enjoyable follow-up to My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible. Now I'll just sit patiently here, reading other things, while I wait for Lucy by the Sea.
 

Anything is Possible

At the end of the e-book edition of My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout was an excerpt from her follow-up book Anything Is Possible. (In the interview with the author at the end of Anything Is Possible, I learned that she wrote most of Anything is Possible while she was writing My Name is Lucy Barton. As she was writing the first book and the conversations that Lucy and her mother have about people from Lucy's childhood, Strout realized that she wondered about the stories of the people that they talk about. She wrote those stories as she was writing the first book.

Lucy Barton is a key character in Anything is Possible, but this is not her story. She is the glue that holds these disparate stories together. Lucy is only a direct part of one of the stories. One thing that Strout says in the interview at the end of the book was about Olive Kitteridge but I think it applies to Anything Is Possible as well.

I'm interested in different points of view, and that's fun to do in a small town. I just love how, in a small town, we think we know someone, but we only know them this way, and someone else knows them that way. That was interesting to me, initially, as a way to give readers a break. But then as I made these characters I realized that they are living people who happen to know Olive in their own way.

In many ways, Anything is Possible is like a collection of short stories rather than a long narrative. There are stories about mothers leaving, about going from rags to riches, about different directions that the lives of siblings take.

Like My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything Is Possible is written in Strout's sparse, stream of consciousness style. It wasn't quite as short as Lucy Barton but it was an equally quick read. The fact that I've already downloaded Oh William! which is the next book in the Amagash "series" where we get to learn a lot more about Lucy's ex-husband, William. I've also but a hold on Lucy by the Sea (Amagash #4) which I'm expecting to be available in about 12 weeks. That should tell you all you need to know.
 

My Name is Lucy Barton

Years ago, I read Amy and Isabelle, Elizabeth Strout's debut novel. That was in the days before I kept really good records of what I'd read. (Can you imagine if I first started keeping track of what I read back when I first started reading?) That means I remember enjoying the novel, but can't remember too much about it. Now that I've read My Name is Lucy Barton, I can't believe that I don't remember her spare, kind of stream-of-consciousness writing style.

My Name is Lucy Barton is the first novel in what is now a series of 4 where Lucy Barton, a woman raised in poverty somewhere in Illinois, is featured. Lucy is hospitalized and her mother, whom she hasn't seen in a long time comes to sit with Lucy in the hospital at the request of Lucy's husband, William. Lucy and her mother share conversations about people they knew in common when Lucy was growing up. Learning about these other people, we also learn more about Lucy and her upbringing.

I can see why this novel wouldn't be for everyone but I enjoyed it a lot. And was surprised by how quickly I read it - and by how short it was. My copy of the e-book ended with an excerpt to Anything is Possible which I downloaded almost immediately after finding him Lucy Barton.