OH WILLIAM!
ELIZABETH STROUT
Viking, 240pp, £14.99
Lucy Barton, the writer-heroine from two of Elizabeth Strout’s previous books, My Name Is Lucy
Barton and Anything Is Possible, unravels her later years, the complex relationships with her ex-husband, William, their daughters, his mother, her dead second husband. ‘There is something beautiful about her characters’ heartache – particularly the way they are always so flummoxed by it,’ said Johanna Thomas-corr in the Sunday Times. The theme of never really knowing your loved ones, and never being known by them, runs throughout Strout’s book. But for Corr-thomas
Oh William! is an ‘intensely truthful book not only about how we experience trauma but the ways we keep on reframing our perceptions of it’. Her narrative ‘feels devastating and vital, bleak and tender. Cathartic? Yes. Comforting? No.’
Susie Mesure in the Spectator agreed. ‘What Strout is doing, in her customary crisp prose, is getting the reader – addressed throughout as “you” – to reassess every single relationship they’ve ever had.’ For Rupert Christiansen in the
Daily Telegraph, Strout has a ‘distinctively female voice, expressive of ordinary family circumstance but also alert to the many ironies and falterings of the human heart’. But he wasn’t wholly convinced, describing the novel as ‘a hesitant account that reads like a transcript of effortful psychotherapy sessions’. Finally, though, he seemed won over: ‘Strout’s strength doesn’t lie in narrative drive or philosophical depth: she is a novelist of the inner sensibility, and what makes her so compellingly readable is her rendering of the ebb and flow of emotion and impression.’