I’m a big fan of Modern Mrs. Darcy and her end of year best-of list (linked) aligns well with what I have already enjoyed / will be putting on my list for the coming year (she also has a fantastic summer guide, not to mention a podcast entirely about helping people find the right book which is super charming – I highly recommend checking her out). I haven’t read any Elizabeth Strout before this year, but so many people love the world that she has created (Olive Kitteridge, the Burgess Boys all exist in the same world as Lucy Barton – this is something I love, as when Emily St. John Mandel releases a new book and you realize that the characters find their way into other stories). There are four books to the Amgash series, which is focused on Lucy Barton – but I skipped the first two and jumped in with #3, Oh, William! which was released in 2021. Since they were both available, I just read books #3 and 4 (Lucy by the Sea) back to back. If you’ve read the whole series you might feel differently, but overall I didn’t feel that this made a tremendous difference – although I might still go back and read the first two books, I think I was able to understand the story well enough.
Oh, William! is an aptly titled book about Lucy and her ex-husband, William. They married when Lucy was much younger, had two daughters, and divorced after about 15-20 years of marriage because he was having multiple affairs. William went on to first marry a friend of theirs with whom he had been having an affair, then divorcing her after seven or eight years to marry a much younger, charismatic woman named Estelle. He and Estelle have a young daughter, Brigitte, who is about 10 years old. Everyone lives in New York City, and now that Lucy is in her 60s and William is 70 they have a unique, intense relationship. What I’m saying is they depend on one another, despite being married to other people.
Then, some things happen. Lucy will narrate about what happens, with many asides, and a few sentences to foreshadow what will come next. Every so often, Lucy will have an epiphany about her own emotions – Lucy is very internal and contemplative, although Lucy is also very self absorbed. And there are lots of sentences that restate and summarize and begin with, “what I mean to say is”. So there’s that.
One of the things that happens is that Lucy’s husband dies, and she is consumed by grief for him. And not long after, maybe a year or so, William’s wife leaves him. And shortly before that happens, William discovers that his mother had a child before him that he never knew about (secret children are not possible in the days of Ancestry.com), and so of course Lucy is there to support her ex husband through the experience of meeting his new sister. They take a road trip to Maine together, which gives Lucy the opportunity to contemplate her relationships even more.
The next book, Lucy by the Sea, picks up where the last book ends, more or less. The last book ends around the end of 2019, so you can guess what the plot of book #4 revolves around – it’s the pandemic. William, a scientist, is aware that Covid will be bad in NYC before most people, and he insists on getting Lucy out of her apartment and into a more isolated town in Maine, where he is able to secure them a house (William has money, if you couldn’t tell by the much younger wife referenced above). Then the events of 2020-21 take place, almost al of them appearing in the novel, including the insurrection. Also, things with William and Lucy’s children are quite unstable – both of her daughters experience troubles, and none of the relationships are perfect.
It’s easy enough to read these books, if you’re intrigued by these relationships and want to know what happens to these people. Strout’s writing style is very direct, lots of dialogue interspersed with Lucy’s narration, all in short chapters. I preferred Oh, William! to Lucy by the Sea, in part because LBTS was sort of bending over backwards to both include liberal politics (Lucy hates 45, she supports her daughters taking part in the protest movement, diligently wears her mask, etc) AND to offer an apology of sorts to anyone who DID vote for 45. Her characters were deeply impacted by the pandemic, as many of us were (and probably more so in a place like NYC), yet Lucy showed a great deal of compassion for people who sort of perpetuated the problems. I know that this is a reasonable way to live – to understand and accept that people can have very different viewpoints and to try to be empathetic rather than divisive. Yet there was something about the way that this was done that just didn’t sit well with me, and I can’t quite articulate it.
Overall, I enjoyed the aspect of this book about relationships – I love to see how people explore relationships both past and present, especially when they have lived as much life as Lucy. Lucy has had a difficult life – her family lived in poverty, in a tiny garage in Amgash, Illinois, where her two siblings still live. Earlier novels explore her upbringing and relationship with her siblings in more detail, but there are enough flashbacks in these books to provide a general understanding that she experienced abuse and neglect from her parents. She was able to leave for college, and her ability to move beyond her upbringing is a surprise and a gift for her – but also, she knows that she will never truly escape her past. She always contends with where she came from, and I find it refreshing to read about a character who is honestly grappling with that sort of trauma.
There are other ways in which Lucy is a sort of 60-something manic-pixie-dream-girl, unable to really understand aspects of life happening around her – some of that is her trauma, but some of it is something else that I found unlikeable about Lucy (and I’m not sure that was the intent).