I learned this about the sound of the sea: There were two levels to it, there was a deep ongoing sound that was quietly massive, and there was also the sound of the water hitting the rocks; always this was thrilling to me.
Lucy Barton returns in Lucy by the Sea, with the same likeable and informal tone that author Elizabeth Strout brought to the earlier novels in which she appears. This time around, Lucy cancels her European book tour on a gut feeling just before the pandemic shuts down the world, and at the urging of her ex-husband and good friend, William, she joins him in a seaside rented house in Maine to wait out the lockdowns. Of course this takes longer than expected, and as Lucy meets new people in Maine (at a six foot distance) and worries about her adult daughters and their husbands, Strout captures something very authentic and worthy of noting about the pandemic experience. Lucy eventually reaches some profound conclusions about life in her declining years (I believe the quote above is about recognising what is quietly massive and consistent in your life and delighting in the unexpected thrills) and Strout seems to be using this novel to look back and tie together her own lifetime of thought and writing. Short and sweet and engagingly relevant, this was a pleasure to read. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in the final forms.)
Here is what I did not know that morning in March: I did not know that I would never see my apartment again. I did not know that one of my friends and a family member would die of this virus. I did not know that my relationship with my daughters would change in ways I could never have anticipated. I did not know that my entire life would become something new. These are the things I did not know that morning in March while I was walking to William’s car with my little violet-colored rolling suitcase.
Lucy states more than once that she is not smart about the world, so it took William (a parasitologist — not an expert on viruses, but a working scientist who does follow the news) to whisk her away from Manhattan, enforcing quarantines and social distancing and masking protocols before the general public began to follow suit. It was interesting to watch Lucy in lockdown — trying to make sense of everything on the news from the BLM protests to the Capitol Riots; wanting to understand but overwhelmed by the images — and it was heart-rending to witness her isolation, with only her often annoying ex-husband for company and her beloved daughters keeping their distance. Nothing like a pandemic to clarify one’s philosophy:
I did not go back to sleep. I stayed awake and I thought: We all live with people — and places — and things — that we have given great weight to. But we are weightless, in the end.
While all of the pandemic and domestic events are playing out, I found it interesting that Strout decided to have characters from her earlier works intersect. At one point Lucy thinks (writes? I have no idea who Lucy is narrating this story to), “So there was that kind of thing that happened. There were these times, is what I am saying, where the people I met were interesting. And their stories interwove!” And that’s when I realised that the Bob Burgess who organised the house rental for William was the Bob from The Burgess Boys, and the woman he had just met at dinner through Lucy was Katherine Caskey from Abide With Me. And when Lucy at one point thinks (writes?), “I read a book a few years ago, and some character in it said something like, It’s our duty to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can,” I thought to myself that that sounded familiar and I googled it and found it was said by Olive Kitteridge in Olive, Again. And that would be weird enough (to have Lucy read and quote from a book by Elizabeth Strout) if Lucy didn’t eventually meet a character who knows Olive Kitteridge and talks about her. (There could well be other references to earlier work that I didn’t get, but I did, overall, like these references; this did have the overarching feeling of a summing up of a lifetime of work for Strout.)
And then this thought went through my mind: 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.
There’s an authentic compassion for humanity on display in this novel — William and Lucy even discuss folks from the other end of the political spectrum and acknowledge their understandable frustration and disenfranchisement — and throughout, Lucy is just so likeable and relatable that I wanted the best for her while realising that Strout would probably need to give her a “true” ending. Ultimately, I enjoyed this and I believed it.
