This US author’s previous readers will be comfortable with her new book, as it features characters enormously familiar from several earlier novels. But first-timers to Strout need not feel disappointed. Lucy by the Sea stands on its own beautifully, depicting the start of COVID-19 in the USA in recent years and what some people did to avoid it.
Lucy Barton is living alone in New York after the death of her second husband. She shares two adult daughters with her first husband, William, whose third wife and young daughter have just left him. Complicated? Just wait, gentle reader.
William, a scientist, can see the threat that COVID-19 presents, so he pleads with his daughters and their husbands to leave the city, and persuades Lucy, who seems unaware of the threat of the pandemic, to move to a rented house in Maine with him, just for a short while. But it turns into something longer. Lucy acquiesces, believing she will be away for just a few weeks.
Strout has written this book like journal entries from Lucy, a character who is a novelist. It is years since Lucy and William lived together, so each must make adjustments. William knows some people in their small seaside town of Crosby, and Lucy becomes fond of one in particular. The couple have to navigate antagonism from some townspeople wary of out-of-towners, particularly from New York, believing they might carry the virus.
The record kept by Lucy of their time by the sea, their daughters’ lives and problems, and navigating the health risks all around makes gentle, introspective reading about what Strout calls ‘this sweet sad place that we call Earth’.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. From a young age she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days.
She was also drawn to books, and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction. During the summer months of her childhood she played outdoors, either with her brother, or, more often, alone, and this is where she developed her deep and abiding love of the physical world: the seaweed covered rocks along the coast of Maine, and the woods of New Hampshire with its hidden wildflowers.
During her adolescent years, Strout continued writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on. She read biographies of writers, and was already studying – on her own – the way American writers, in particular, told their stories. Poetry was something she read and memorized; by the age of sixteen was sending out stories to magazines. Her first story was published when she was twenty-six.
Strout attended Bates College, graduating with a degree in English in 1977. Two years later, she went to Syracuse University College of Law, where she received a law degree along with a Certificate in Gerontology. She worked briefly for Legal Services, before moving to New York City, where she became an adjunct in the English Department of Borough of Manhattan Community College. Juggling the needs that came with raising a family and her teaching schedule, she found a few hours each day to work on her writing.
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