Haunting reminder of pandemic’s early days
‘Lucy by the Sea’ places beloved heroine in a personal lockdown
Elizabeth’s Strout’s ninth book, “Lucy by the Sea,” is a haunting reminder of how it feels to have your life capsized by a global pandemic. In crisp, spare prose, Strout returns readers to that first, disorienting year when we were all unmoored, our lives undone by confusion, fear and, all too often, loss. The pandemic was and still is a paradox: We’re all in it together, but the experience is isolating and deeply personal.
This is the first modern pandemic novel I’ve read, and I’m certain it will not be the last. We should expect this topic for years, even decades, to come.
Lucy Barton, the heroine of Strout’s “My Name Is Lucy Barton” (2016) and
“Oh William!” (2021), chronicles her life from March 2020 to April 2021. Her exhusband, William, father of her two grown daughters, bundles her off to a small town in Maine, where he has rented a home in which the two of them can ride out the pandemic in platonic companionship. Lucy is still mourning the death of her second husband, David, while William is recovering from the end of his third marriage, to Estelle, and his separation from their young daughter, Bridget.
William is a parasitologist and Lucy is a writer, so they face the unfolding crisis in different ways. William, who is focused on the science, is an early advocate for masks, social distancing, wiping down groceries and more. He’s a strategic thinker who foresees potential problems and acts. Lucy is much more adrift. She is slower to internalize the magnitude of the moment, yet she is able to capture her disorientation in words: “I did not know where to put my mind. There was a feeling of mutedness. Like my ears were plugged up as though I was underwater.”
For Lucy, as for most of us, the pandemic is a reckoning, a personal reset that compels her to examine her family, her past, her purpose. Lucy’s childhood was marked by extreme emotional and physical deprivation; her mother was particularly cruel, and Lucy spent most of her days lonely, cold and hungry. Remembering those joyless years, Lucy says to William: “My whole childhood was a lockdown. I never saw anyone or went anywhere.”
In the intervening decades, though, Lucy has made up a “nice” mother, whom she summons when she needs love and support. As anyone 50 or older will tell you, learning how to parent yourself is a necessity, which Strout captures with compassion and concision. The “nice” mother in Lucy’s head repeatedly assures her that she is making the right choices, that she will find a way through the pandemic.
As ever, Strout’s prose is elegantly unadorned. Lucy shares her story as if the reader is a trusted confidante who deserves careful explanation. The narrative is frank, like Lucy, and broken mostly into short sections. This mimics the rhythm of those early pandemic days, when it was hard to focus, difficult to reach conclusions. Better to break life into discrete, digestible bits.
Lucy and William are in contact with their daughters, Chrissy and Becka, who are together in Connecticut for the early months of the pandemic. Lucy, especially, struggles with being physically separated from her girls. The family does manage to get together a few times, and Lucy is called upon to handle a potential calamity in one of her daughters’ lives.
In Maine, Lucy and William take walks and slowly begin to make a few friends. And this is where what I’ll call the “Stroutiverse” converges. In new novels, Strout often revisits characters from previous works, as was the case with “Oh William!” (2021), which followed William and Lucy’s earlier journey to Maine to meet William’s recently discovered half-sister. That half-sister, Lois, appears in “Lucy by the Sea,” as does Bob Burgess, who becomes an essential friend to Lucy and William. Readers will remember Bob from Strout’s 2013 novel, “The Burgess Boys.” Bob is now married to Katherine Caskey, first introduced in “Abide With Me” (2006).
Lucy also befriends Charlene Bibber, a cleaner at the Maple Tree Apartments, now home to an elderly
Olive Kitteridge, the bracing, eponymous hero of Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 2008, and 2019’s “Olive, Again.” Olive is friendly with a fellow tenant named Isabelle, the mother in Strout’s 1998 daughter-mother novel, “Amy and Isabelle,” who also played a supporting role in “Olive, Again.” While Olive and Isabelle don’t appear as characters in their own rights, Charlene shares details about their lives and catches up readers at the same time. (For me, news of Olive Kitteridge is always welcome. My fingers are crossed for a third Olivefocused book.)
All of this is to say that if the pandemic has been a reckoning for many people, “Lucy by the Sea” feels like a fictional reckoning for Strout, with characters culled from a quarter century of fiction. Clearly, they’re all still walking around in her head, and some of them have walked right onto the page.
Still, the novel remains an intimate look at the pandemic’s effect on one woman and the small circle of people with whom she is in contact. It is mostly a privileged crowd, with safe places to stay and money at the ready. When Strout brings nonpandemic news from the broader world into this tiny universe — including George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement — it is jarring, as if real life has interrupted fiction. These are the book’s strangest and, oddly, most distancing moments.
As the novel closes, the first round of vaccines has circulated and the world has started to open back up, offering a tantalizing glimpse of something approaching normalcy. Although Lucy faces the future with a “shiver of foreboding,” she recognizes that she must trust herself.
“We are all in lockdown, all the time,” she thinks.
“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.”