Lucy by the Sea

It was a though each day was like a huge stretch of ice I had to walk over.
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout

Those early lockdown days. I remember them well. The empty streets. Standing at the window to wave at loved ones. Wiping down delivered grocery orders. Seeking out the lovely spots in life, an early flower, an orange sunset, streaming a concert. We thought it would end, but it hasn’t really ended. The virus continues to menace us, its legacy seen all around us. Relationships that couldn’t bear the pressure, the moments of anxiety or panic that still niggle at us, the divisiveness in society.

Those of us who are introverts fared better, lost in our books and hobbies and work. Perhaps some of us understand what Lucy Barton show more knew: “We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all.” We are mysteries to one another, holding onto each other for dear life, closer, closer, but really, who of us really understands another?

Lucy Barton’s imagination places her in other’s lives. After seeing the January 6 attack on the Capitol she remembers a time when she felt humiliated, dismissed by wealthy college students as an old woman writing about poverty, and for a moment understood them. “No, those were Nazis and racists,” she afterwards thought. And yet, everyone wants to feel that they matter. No matter how poor, how powerless. It is her ability to sympathize with people one can’t like that makes her remarkable.

Lucy was lucky; she escaped, went to university and wrote her memoirs. Married a man she loved, who broke her heart. Married another man she loved, who died and broke her heart. She had two daughters, now struggling with choices. Her siblings never escaped their childhood, never fit into the world or were too broken by the abuse of their childhood.

Lucy by the Sea is the latest Lucy Barton novel, set during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. Her first husband, William, rescues her from New York City, taking her to a small town in Maine, to save her life. Lucy can’t concentrate, has anxiety attacks, worries about her friends and family. And also makes new friends, marvels at the sea and the sunsets. And she and William bond anew.

The novel is filled with people from Elizabeth Strout’s novels, of course the Lucy Barton books, but also Bob Burgess from The Burgess Boys, and Olive Kitteridge, and people from Abide with Me.

The novel embraces the message Strout has been trying to tell us all along, what is important in life. Compassion. And, for whatever its worth, imperfect, beautiful love.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased. show less

This novel left me conflicted. In this fourth book following the life of Lucy Barton, Lucy is hustled out of her apartment in New York by her ex-husband and taken to a remote house on the coast of Maine to wait out the pandemic with him. Elizabeth Strout has been writing about Lucy's life for awhile and here we see what kind of old woman she is. It's interesting to see how people change (or fail to change) over time and I'm on board for this project of Strout's. There's even a look at Olive Kitteridge in this novel, now living in a retirement home. Looking at how Lucy is thinking more than ever about her childhood and about her siblings that she left behind as she fought to be free of background of deprivation certainly fits with the show more elderly people I know. And Lucy's situation is exacerbated by the isolation of the pandemic and by being isolated with William, her strong-willed and not hugely communicative ex-husband. Which is to say, Lucy's tendencies toward worry have solidified into a querulous focus on all the things that upset her, past and present.

Which brings me to my conflict with this novel; I appreciate the project Strout is finishing up here, with this final book about Lucy, and I love the earlier novels in this sequence (Anything is Possible is brilliant), but Lucy is just not that fun a character to spend time with. By pairing this fussy woman who overthinks some things while entirely overlooking other more obvious things, with a focus on events we are arguably still living through ourselves, this novel is often more frustrating that illuminating. I'm on board for how Lucy, no matter how secure and loved she is, can't help but focus on the same uncertainties that blighted her childhood. But this older Lucy, inured to the real lives of those less privileged than herself, just doesn't see how the solutions her family finds to the problems posed by the pandemic, are solutions only open to those with ample resources, from extra homes waiting for when they are needed, to the ability to simply pay others to take the risks deemed too dangerous for themselves. It's an odd blind spot in a character consumed by assessing how she is perceived by others.

I'm curious how this book will be seen in years removed from the current moment. It also leaves me with the same question I've been thinking about since 9/11; when are we ready to read fictitious accounts about events we ourselves lived through? And which accounts do we want to read? I found myself unsympathetic to characters whose difficulties during the pandemic were the most minimal, sheltered as they were by wealth and a willingness to use that wealth to escape, but I think that I would have enjoyed a novel told from the point of view of someone who lacked the ability to distance themselves. Or maybe I just need more distance from events to be able to engage with them in novels.

I'm looking forward to Strout's next project, whatever form that takes. show less

Lucy Barton is a writer based in New York City, and in March, 2020 she is unaware and not prepared for the changes that will soon dramatically impact all aspects of life. If Lucy is somewhat in denial, her former husband William is not, and quickly takes steps to improve Lucy’s safety and that of their two adult daughters. Lucy agrees to share a rented house in Maine with William; their daughters make other arrangements. Everyone thinks this will only last a few weeks (didn’t we all?), but as time goes on they find new rhythms to their days. They also face loss in various forms, and at the same time forge new types of relationships with one another.

When My Name is Lucy Barton was released in 2016, I had no idea it would be part of a show more series, let alone a series I have consistently rated 4.5 stars. Each book has struck an emotional chord that surprised me given the somewhat unreliable first-person narration and relatively spare prose. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, as there are aspects of Lucy’s life I can relate to; namely, trying to create deep and loving relationships with adult daughters, having had no role model growing up. Lucy stumbles and then tries again, sometimes making progress and sometimes setting them back a couple paces.

That said, readers need to be prepared for a pandemic-centric novel, and one that also covers several other major US events from what was, by all accounts, a fairly ghastly year. Strout’s depiction is spot on, and resurrected some memories that I would prefer not to dwell on. I hope to see more Lucy Barton novels and perhaps the next time there will be more good news. I vote for a meetup between Lucy and Strout’s other notable heroine, Olive Kitteridge. show less

IN A NUTSHELL
‘Lucy by the Sea’ is a quietly told, introspective fictional memoir of Lucy Barton’s experience of the first COVID Lockdown and the changes, frustrations, fears and reassessments of priorities that came in its wake. It’s an undramatic, truthful account, focused on Lucy’s emotional landscape. It deals as much with ageing as it does with the stresses of Lockdown. Not so much the physical changes that ageing brings, but the changes in priorities and attitudes, the adjustment of long-term relationships: with her ex-husband and with her now adult daughters. For me, it ran a little long, but that was partly because this felt like a slice of life, albeit a life disrupted by Lockdown, rather than a story with a beginning, show more a middle and an end.

I relished the first two books in the Amgash series, ‘My Name Is Lucy Barton’ (2016) and ‘Anything Is Possible’ (2018). The writing was astonishingly good and exceptionally honest. Lucy Barthon’s voice was distinctive and engaging. They were novels that described life as we live it in a compelling and truthful way. Lucy Barton’s relationships showed all the signs of fracture and wear that you might expect from people who’ve lived through hard times. Lucy Barton grew up in extreme poverty. She is no longer poor, but she has never left the experience of poverty behind. I have the third book, ‘Oh William!’ (2021) on my shelves, but I skipped it to read the fourth book, ‘Lucy By The Sea’ (2022) out of sequence because it fits into my ‘Fiction in a Time of COVID’ reading challenge.

‘Lucy By The Sea’ was a quietly told fictional memoir of the emotions and reflections triggered by lockdown and the pandemic. It was not dramatic, but it was truthful, and the truths it shared, even though they were not my truths, summoned my own memories of lockdown: my rage at the loss of life that my incompetent government tolerated and the contrast between all that death and the relative comfort and safety of my lockdown.

Part of my fascination with the Lucy Barton character is that I have very little in common with her. She is empathetic, deeply curious about people and is good at intuiting their emotions. She’s often anxious, sometimes to a crippling degree. She’s so focused on her inner life that the mechanics of the world tend to pass her by. Through her, I finally understood how so many people failed to take in the scale of COVID and the likely length of lockdowns, even though all the relevant information was widely available by the beginning of March 2020.

The start of the novel, when Lucy accedes to her ex-husband’s request to leave NYC and live in Maine, was powerful and evocative. Lucy’s interior landscape and her shifting, increasingly fraught relationships with her daughters and her ex-husband felt authentic. Lockdown disrupted Lucy’s life, taking her from the familiar into the unknown, throwing her back into daily contact with her ex-husband while adding worries about, and restricting contact with, her daughters.

One of the things that resonated with me in Lucy’s reaction to the disruption of her life was her recognition that, when Lockdown was over, things would not go back to normal. Her life, and the lives of most of the people she knew, had been changed. Lucy recognises that she no longer has any desire to return to her Manhattan apartment or to the way of life she had there. Lockdown and the losses inflicted by COVID triggered this recognition, but they didn’t cause the change. They enforced a hiatus that enabled a reassessment of what was important. Lucy comes to recognise that she has entered old age and that what she wants for herself and from others is no longer what she wanted when she was young or middle-aged.

For me, the book ran a little long, perhaps because Elizabeth Strout wanted to show what the new normal looked like, or perhaps she wanted to show that life asserts itself even in the middle of a large-scale disruption. Whatever the reason, the final sections of the book felt to me like watching the tide go out on a gently sloping shore: not dramatic but easy to believe in.

Kimberly Farr’s narration was masterful. In my head, she is the voice of Lucy Barton, even when I read the text off the page. I recommend listening to the audiobook. Kimberley Farr’s narration added a level of intimacy to the reading experience. As I listened to her, it was easy to feel that she was sharing her thoughts and emotions only with me. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample.
https://youtu.be/AgU0C3NhUAI?si=QVeFbwmFSFWXqhu9
https://youtu.be/AgU0C3NhUAI?si=IMhiwgb__QRj8O_Q show less

I should preface that I love Elizabeth Strout and would probably enjoy reading her grocery list! This is the third book in the Amgash series following My Name is Lucy Barton and Oh William! (Or it’s the fourth book if Strout’s story collection Anything is Possible is included.)

This book once again reunites Lucy and her philandering ex-husband and long-time friend William. He convinces Lucy to leave Manhattan and move to a small town in coastal Maine as New York City goes into lockdown because of COVID-19. The novel focuses on Lucy’s thoughts and feelings as she adjusts to
life during a pandemic. Though isolated from the rest of her family, she maintains contact with them and tries to help them through their own struggles and show more crises.

Because of its conversational tone and rambling narrative, reading the book is like meeting with a friend
and listening as she chats away, jumping from topic to topic: “Before I tell you about . . . let me say that
. . .” Since I have encountered Lucy in previous books, I felt like I were revisiting with an old friend.

Lucy captures perfectly life during the pandemic. Initially there is a sense of disbelief. Then as the
nature of the pandemic is understood, various emotions emerge: loneliness, sadness, uncertainty,
anxiety, and grief: “The sadness that rose and fell in me was like the tides.” Readers will certainly be
able to relate to Lucy’s feelings. I loved her description of feeling “as though each day was like a huge
stretch of ice I had to walk over . . . and I had to make it through each day without knowing when it
would stop, and it seemed it would not stop, and so I felt a great uneasiness.” I even found myself
chuckling at the small annoyances that plague us when we’re in forced isolation with another person:
Lucy hates William’s slurping when he eats, and he hates to see her floss her teeth. She describes
episodes of brain fog, “Covid mind” William calls it. For many people, the various traumas of the
pandemic served to amplify traumas of the past, and Lucy relives childhood traumas and the death of
her second husband. She also finds herself in situations that teach her about herself; for instance, her
failure to act in one situation has her admitting, “And I learned something that day. About myself and
people, and their self-interest.”

Despite her own weariness and sadness, Lucy does realize that things could be worse: “I thought of all
the people – old people and young people – who had lived out the pandemic in rooms . . . Alone.” She
does manage to find comfort in new friendships and in the beauty that surrounds her: “What a thing
the physical world is!” Perhaps Lucy’s friend expresses best a way to live: “’It’s our duty to bear the
burden . . . with as much grace as we can.’”

What I really appreciated is Lucy’s trying to understand people who are not like her and hold opposite
views. She mentions that a problem is that “Everyone thinks like themselves” so she makes a point of
considering things from others’ points of view. She and William discuss Trump supporters. William says,
“’They’re angry. Their lives have been hard.’” And Lucy makes friends with one of them and concludes,
“And what if I had continued to feel that my entire life, what if all the jobs I had taken in my life were
not enough to really make a living, what if I felt looked down upon all the time by the wealthier people
in this country . . . I saw what these people were feeling; they were like my sister Vicky, and I understood
them. They had been made to feel poorly about themselves, they were looked at with disdain, and they
could no longer stand it.” She even writes a story that “is sympathetic toward a white cop who liked the
old president and who does an act of violence and gets away with it” and she admits about her
protagonist, “I loved him.” It seems that Lucy tries to love everyone though she struggles with loving
herself.
Lucy knows that people are different: “We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world
takes its swings at us” and “some people are luckier than others.” But everyone suffers and experiences
sadness, pain, and fear: “money makes no difference in these kinds of things.” She realizes she may
have more in common with people than she wants to admit: for instance, she draws away from people
like Charlene and her sister Vicky who have “a faint odor of loneliness . . . because I had always been
afraid of giving off that odor myself.” She repeats that “Everyone needs to feel important.” She also
realizes that though “We are alone in these things that we suffer,” everyone is “only doing what we can
to get through.” In essence, “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.”

I loved the many characteristics of Strout’s style: a truly introspective protagonist, the references to
characters from other books, and the short sentences which reveal a complex understanding of
relationships and the human condition. Readers should be warned, however, that this may be a painful
read since it serves as a reminder of pandemic experiences. Some people may prefer more distance
from a not-yet-over pandemic. I myself would take any opportunity to live in Lucy’s head for a while.

Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). show less

Summary: Lucy Barton goes with her ex-husband William to a house on the coast of Maine during the COVID lockdown of 2020.

On a premonition, Lucy Barton cancelled her book tour in Europe. Then her ex-husband William, a parasitologist, shows up at her apartment and insists that she pack up and leave with him to get out of New York City to an out of the way place in Maine. It is early March of 2020 and COVID-19 has arrived in New York City. William has followed the epidemic and can foresee what is in store. He wants to get Lucy and their daughters out of the city. Reluctantly, she closes up her place and goes with him to an old house with character on the coast of Maine, found for them by an old friend, Bob Burgess.

Much of the book is show more Lucy’s interior monologue. We go through those early weeks that we all remember of hearing of the rapidly climbing number of infections, of friends getting sick, of worries about family, particularly Lucy’s younger daughter, who wants to stay in New York with her loser boyfriend. We re-live socially distanced and masked encounters. And we remember lives reduced to daily routines of household life, Zoom calls, walks outdoors, punctuated by the news. At points, like many of us, Lucy wonders if she is losing her mind, or at least her memory. We relive that growing recognition both of how bad things were and that this wouldn’t be solved by a few weeks of lockdown.

Sharing a house with your ex raises all kinds of memories for both of them. William had gone on to a number of affairs and failed marriages. Chastened by age and health issues, he takes stock of all the failures in his life. For both of them, as they watch one daughter in an unhealthy relationship and another unable to have children and going through a rocky period in their marriage, they relive their own failed relationship as they try to offer what help parents can and cannot do, as they re-negotiate their relationships with their adult children, and with each other. I will leave you to find out how being in lockdown together works out for them.

Bob Burgess, whose wife is the town minister, becomes Lucy’s sounding board as they take walks together. Like so many of us, Lucy has to sort out all her feelings about those who don’t wear masks, including a sister who has converted to a conservative form of Christianity, who nearly dies but doesn’t. for all those who support the current president, for those who refuse the vaccine including a woman who she works with at a food pantry.

What is striking is that we see both her interior reactions and a posture of listening, of just trying to understand and not change. Coming to terms with some of the wounds of her own past, she finds herself in a place of gentleness with others, something I wish I could have achieved at times during this period.

Strout portrays people who grew during the isolation of lockdown. They examined their own and other’s flawed and broken and yet unique lives, and the efforts to love as best as they could. They nurtured relationships even as it appeared the country was trying to tear itself apart.

This is not a book to read if you don’t want to relive those years. But I found that the reading reminded me of my own journey of trying to make sense of our radically changed lives and country. And I got to do this with this delightful woman, Lucy Barton. I wonder to what degree she is an alter ego of Elizabeth Strout. What I do know is that I’ve loved her Olive Kitteridge books and this as well (Olive makes a kind of cameo appearance!). And there was the delightful discovery, in writing this review, that there are several previous Lucy Barton books. You can bet that I will be on the lookout for them! show less

It is the early spring of 2020 and the whole world is about to shut down. Lucy Barton, a recent widow and a long-time resident of New York City, is on the verge of being stranded in a quarantined city until her first husband William convinces her to move with him to coastal Maine to ride out the Covid storm. There she begins her fish-out-of-water existence as a stranger in a place where she is not always welcome while also struggling to keep her family life together and resume her writing career. As the months pass, life does bring her some joys along with the many hardships, such as her budding friendship with Bob Burgess, a long-standing member of the community and someone William has known for many years.

Lucy by the Sea is author show more Elizabeth Strout’s fourth novel to feature what is perhaps her most beloved character. It is a very introspective story in which not much of consequence happens, but then that is really the point given the focus on the social isolation that the pandemic imposed on us all for so long. At the heart of the tale is the way in which Lucy addresses the grief of the recent loss of her second husband David, as well as the way she continues to reconnect with William and forgive him for his many past transgressions. If there is anything amounting to dramatic tension in the book, it comes from Lucy’s adult daughters, Chrissy and Becka, whose personal lives are a bit of a mess at the moment.

While the story falls a little short of being captivating, Strout’s writing is uniformly superb and her deep understanding of what makes Lucy tick is marvelous. This is an author who seems to be at the top of her game when it comes to insights into what makes us human and there is an admirable confidence about the way she allows Lucy’s inherent vulnerability to show through. She is even a little playful at times: there is a great line in which Becka quotes her failed poet husband in his attempt to insult Lucy by saying “He thought you were just an older white woman writing about older white women”. Of course, Strout could have been pointing at herself there, which is just one of the small surprises contained throughout this thoughtful volume. show less