Every book in Elizabeth Strout’s series about Lucy Barton feels like an encounter with a set of Matryoshka dolls (aka Russian dolls). You get to the end of each one with a deeper understanding of Lucy’s character, her past and her relationships with family members, but then the next book adds a further level of knowledge and insight.
In Oh William and Lucy By the Sea — the third and fourth books in the series — we learn much about Lucy’s troubled childhood, her resulting lack of confidence and her long and complex relationship with her first husband.
I can’t do justice to all the elements of these books in one post, so I’ll limit myself to just one aspect — the William/Lucy relationship.
Oh William!
William is but a shadowy figure in the first book, My Name is Lucy Barton. He’s just the man who is at home looking after the children while Lucy, then in her fourties, is in hospital. I don’t think he was even named in that book and barely features in book 2, Anything is Possible.
By the time we get Oh William, Lucy and William have been divorced for several years. Though they found new partners, when the book begins they are both alone. William’s third wife has left him and Lucy’s second husband has died a few weeks earlier.
It appears that William and Lucy have remained friends, achieving the kind of settled relationship where they feel they can call each other any time, day or night, if needed. It’s Lucy that a shocked William turns to when he discovers he has a half-sister and it’s Lucy that accompanies him to Maine to learn more about this family secret.
This is a journey of discovery in more ways than one. Oh William! dissects the relationship between these former partners, revealing the often conflicting feelings that have amassed over the decades.
Lucy cares deeply about her former husband; he’s the only person she ever felt safe with, she acknowledges. But he’s not an easy man to understand or to like. “William has always been a mystery to me,” Lucy observes, “and to our girls as well.” When she speaks about William she does so in a tone that shifts between bemusement, affection, irritation, and wistfulness. She calls him “Oh William!” repeatedly—sometimes in exasperation, sometimes in empathy— a refrain that captures the shifting sands of love, frustration and familiarity in this relationship.
Lucy by the Sea
Lucy by the Sea continues on this theme with the pair riding out the Covid pandemic in a rented house on the coast of Maine. William had taken charge when he heard reports on a looming pandemic, insisting that it wasn’t safe for Lucy to remain in New York.
For the next several months, it’s just the two of them trying to bump along together, cooking, doing jigsaws, watching alarming reports of the pandemic’s progress and fearing for their daughters’ safety. The forced cohabitation creates a new layer to their relationship: they are now together day after day, in close quarters, with “normal” life suspended.
In Lucy by the Sea, William remains a complicated man —controlling at times, reserved and detached at others —but he also shows flashes of care and tenderness. Lucy, for her part, is more open in this book about her own limitations, loneliness, and need for connection.
By the end of the book, their relationship has entered a new chapter. They still confuse and frustrate one another. But there’s a shared understanding that their lives are inextricably linked.
Novels about relationships don’t always hit the mark with me but the quality of Elizabeth Strout’s fiction wins me over every time. Her touch is light — you won’t find long descriptive passages — but with a few deft strokes she adds more and more depth to her narrative. You often don’t realise the full import of these at the time but the significance of even a small detail can creep up on you when added to other small details.
These books are all based on Lucy’s memories so there is no linear structure taking us direct from A to B. Instead Lucy starts down one train of thought, sharing an anecdote about another character or an incident in her life only to quite suddenly announces she doesn’t want to talk about this any more. But then she’ll return to the same train of thought later on. The effect is one of intimacy as if we’re inside Lucy’s head, jumping with her from one topic to another as she makes seemingly random connections.
I can imagine this device would frustrate some readers but I love it. You never know what’s going to come next, what Lucy will reveal. There’s also the question of what isn’t being said. Lucy reveals much about her life but she’s also prone to skirt over some aspects — most notably what happened in the woodshed when she was a child. Is the title of the most recently published book — Tell me Everything — a hint that there are more revelations to come? In a sense, I don’t particularly care if they don’t; I’ll just revel in the writing.