Poor Lucy’s home truths

“YOU will only have one story,” Lucy is told in My Name Is Lucy Barton. Perhaps the same is true of Elizabeth Strout who takes characters from her Booker longlisted novel and has them look sideways at Lucy and her family while exploring their own lives.

Strout reuses some material word for word and even reintroduces Lucy herself, by now a successful novelist, on a rare return home. Yet somehow it works because Strout feeds in enough detail about the Bartons to make these stories richly rewarding.

The inter-connectedness builds up a picture of small-town life in Illinois. It is a community in which few have money but the Bartons are outcasts for being poorer still. Each story is told from a particular viewpoint. For instance, The Sign is about Tommy Guptill, a former farmer who became the school janitor after his farm burned down. He befriended lonely, hungry Lucy and, as an elderly man, he visits her brother Pete. But the two men disagree about the causes of that devastating fire.

In Windmills, widowed school counsellor Patty Nicely suffers abuse from Lucy’s aggressive and angry niece and it pinpoints a trauma in Patty’s own life.

In every case, the stories are as much about what is unspoken as about what people say. Underlying all is a fear of being alone, of being socially ostracised or hurt by the people who should protect you.

Strout can be shocking, as in Cracked when Patty Nicely’s even more damaged sister Linda is wilfully blind to the implications of her husband’s voyeurism. Other characters are broken by experiences in the Second World War and Vietnam. Many characters have “grown up in shame”. Yet these remarkable stories, recounting deep emotional hardships, find positives among deprivation, as the collection’s title suggests.