Discovering Elizabeth Strout
A look at the works of the Pulitzer-winning American author of Olive Kitteridge
In May I went looking for Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, Olive Kitteridge. Having heard several good recommendations, I was thinking ahead to summer reading and a book that Cara might enjoy. However, because there was no Olive available in Peterborough’s Chapters, I settled for My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016). This month I finally picked Lucy up and found it a fascinating read. That led to my purchasing Anything Is Possible (2017) which provided another superb reading experience. The two books are closely linked; their interrelationship is intricate and engrossing.
It’s a little embarrassing — as an Americanist — for me to be discovering Strout so late. The two books just mentioned are her fifth and sixth works of fiction. In certain ways they defy definition. Lucy is a fictional memoir that reads like a novel. Anything is a collection of short stories, even though some reviewers and critics have called it a novel. What I found particularly stimulating is that Lucy Barton’s story, which is in part about a deprived young woman who becomes a successful writer, is amplified and expanded upon—suggestively and subtly—in each of the nine stories that comprise Anything Is Possible. That is pure literary fun for a reader like me, though the family and personal matters that are dramatized could scarcely be called fun. Powerful, poignant, compelling, and sad would be more accurate adjectives.
Who is Lucy Barton and why does she matter? Unlike Strout who was born in Portland, Maine of academic parents, Lucy is the product of an impoverished and apparently loveless upbringing in rural Illinois, near the farming town of Amgash. What a suggestive name Amgash is! Her parents struggled with poverty; her father, who had been a soldier in the Second World War, suffered psychologically in his later life. Lucy remembers what she called “the Thing -- meaning an incident of my father becoming very anxious and not in control of himself.” A suggestive description, but all the more frightening in its vagueness. Slowly we learn that the Thing, “the most horrifying part of my childhood,” had strong sexual dimensions, one of which was her father’s occasional acts of masturbation in public. Those memories continue to haunt Lucy. Her father lived out his ‘trauma’ as a farm worker struggling to provide a marginal existence for his son and two daughters. As children, the Barton kids occasionally had to gather scraps from dumpsters to stay their hunger. Their narrow world offered few glimpses of conventional nurture or love. Their little house, which was more a garage than a home, sat, ironically, in the midst of agricultural plenty, surrounded by fields of waving corn and soybeans.
One of Strout’s goals in Lucy’s memoir is to provide an ongoing measure of the wounds of poverty in a rich country. Lucy’s outlook is grounded in her family’s struggles to make ends meet in rural Illinois. Those experiences serve on one level to offer a powerful tracking of matters of class and aspects (or illusions) of social superiority in America.
The Bartons are judged harshly, and often condemned, by those around them, while of necessity they carry on with their lives in their own quiet pride. To betteroff schoolmates and townsfolk, they are different and even repulsive -- they not only eat poorly, but they “stink.” The costs of such an upbringing are measured not only in the events that Lucy recalls, but also in the recollections about her family and friends that surface in each of the stories in Anything Is Possible. Lucy rises above her lonely and rough start by means of her surprising excellence in school. She earns a College degree, moves to New York (with “its gift of endless encounters”), and becomes a writer. As such, she remains a rather special person in the minds of many Amgashians.
On the one hand the Bartons’ poverty undercuts the American myth of prosperity. On the other hand Lucy’s ascent from such unlikely roots to a successful writing career seems to reinforce that myth. Lucy carries her memories forward because they are hers; they tease and haunt her--indeed, they define how she sees the world and how she writes about it. From an early age she has known loneliness, isolation, deprivation, personal terror, and the craving to be treated well by those she meets. She is in fact remarkable in her naivety and openness. As she mentions several times, she knows little about American popular culture, having never experienced much of radio, television, or movies during her upbringing. But she does know hurt when it is inflicted on her and she deeply appreciates kindness when she meets it.
She has an inclination to fall in love with those who treat her with sympathy. An example is one of her grade-school teachers, Mr. Haynes, who refuses to tolerate superior attitudes in class, especially putdowns at Lucy’s expense: “Do not ever think you are better than someone,” he tells his students and he stands by that declaration.
My Name Is Lucy Barton is a memoir built around a stubborn illness that hospitalizes Lucy in New York. Bed-ridden for nine weeks, she is surprised by a visit from her mother who shows up from Illinois at the request of Lucy’s husband. Daughter and mother haven’t seen each other since before Lucy’s marriage to a graduate student and her move to the West Village in New York. Over five days during which the mother scarcely leaves her bedside, they slowly share memories (though they often differ on details) in a guarded, on-again, off-again manner. Lucy’s mother is a kind of private clairvoyant who is confident that Lucy will recover, but she also expresses views that her daughter finds untenable—“I don’t give a damn what we did to the Indians,” she tells Lucy at one point and on another occasion compulsively and thoughtlessly condemns “our dirty rotten government.”
Lucy’s parents never talked love in their child-rearing. Theirs was an old Puritan-like bond. When on the last day of her visit, Lucy begs her mother to tell her that she loves her, she can only reply positively as if they are playing a game. In later years it is always Lucy who does the connecting by phone. When she tells her mother that they were thought of as trash when they growing up, her mother reacts angrily and rises to unlikely eloquence in her defense of their pioneering roots.
Elizabeth Strout is a careful and suggestive writer. She reminds me of Willa Cather who saw herself as pursuing “the thing not said” in her fiction. She strives to make her sentences dip into crevices in order to say and reveal more. With Lucy we encounter a sense of life and experience unfolding — we encounter a sensibility that is far from ironic, sardonic and superior. As her husband says to her in reference to the complexities around her, “you just don’t get it, do you?” But on a more fundamental and engaging level Lucy does get it--she gets it brilliantly and vividly, opening up dark corners about people for her readers in rich and humane ways.
My Name is Lucy Barton raises many questions and in Anything Is Possible Strout provides another round of answers by adopting the points of view of many who knew her and watched her development over time. Those nine stories are remarkable and memorable in themselves. I wish there was space to say more about them.