Lucy by the Sea: A Novel

Elizabeth Strout does it again - she writes a sterling, beautiful novel that captures its readers with its spare and sparkling prose.

It is the beginning of the pandemic and William, Lucy's ex-husband, wants to get Lucy and himself out of New York City and to Maine. He has a friend there who will loan him a house and William feels they will be much safer than if they remained in New York. Lucy agrees to accompany him and the novel shows how the two of them settle in, face the pandemic, make new friends and interact with their two adult daughters.

Lucy is enraptured by the sound of the sea. It is her song as she faces lockdown. She takes a walk every morning and listens to the sounds of this rural community so different from New York City.

During lockdown, Lucy meets Bob Burgess, a character from one of her earlier novels, and they become great, enduring friends.. Lucy loves him and their walks together are one of her treasured moments. Olive Kitteridge also appears briefly in this novel as a patient in an assisted living facility.

Lucy is still grieving the death of David, her second husband, and the reader can see how she is trying hard to navigate her relationship with William, her first husband ,with whom she shares two daughters, Chrissy and Becca. There is family drama with the daughters but there is never any doubt of Lucy's love and respect for her children.

Lucy is a loving woman who has survived an awfully traumatic childhood. Despite her occasional panic attacks and anxiety, she has arisen from her childhood with grace and love. She remains traumatized from her childhood but her ability to love is remarkable.

I have read all of Elizabeth Strout's novels and each one shines with a beauty of its own. Lucy By The Sea can be read as a stand-alone but would be better appreciated after reading the preceding Lucy Barton novels.

This book was just what I needed. I suffer from severe anxiety, and sometimes depression and this book helped me to let go of some of that. It made me understand that older people can have this and for some of us it'ta normal part of aging. I feel less shamed for being old and not being as wise and well adjusted as I thought I would be. Change isn't as scary as it was.

After seeing Elizabeth Strout live at Eckerd College and hearing Andre Dubus interview her, I gained greater insight into her writing process in formulating her latest great novel, <em>Lucy By the Sea</em>. I have read almost everything Strout has written and love the Lucy Barton character. She is thoughtful, reflective, and so relatable. Strout emphasized in her interview that she loves to write about ordinary people and does that masterfully.

In this novel, Lucy lockdowns with her ex-husband William in 2020. William insists that she leave New York City, and his friend Bob Burgess, a character from another Stout novel, arranges for them to stay in a house in Maine so that they would be safe. Of course, in Maine, they face some anti-New York sentiments from neighbors, but they also connect with old friends and meet some new ones. Connecting with people during this time of isolation was an essential theme of this pandemic novel. Connections included adult children and other relatives, including William's half-sister whom readers met in Strout's previous book, <em>Oh William</em>.

Elizabeth Strout includes much darkness, grief, and loss as Lucy experiences myriad emotions while watching terrifying pandemic newscasts about her home, New York City, during her sojourn in Maine. Strout says that she illuminates life's truth through her characters, and she certainly does that skillfully. It was so realistic to engage in the marital and other personal problems that Lucy's adult children experienced during the lockdown. Lucy's desire to protect them as a mother and still let them make adult decisions without her interference is palpable to a reader. Through the annals of daily life, Lucy's friendship with her ex-husband grows exponentially, and acceptance of each other's habits and quibbles dominate much of the story.

I loved the way Lucy and William's conversations mimicked the conversations we were all having during the first months of the COVID pandemic. Fear of the unknown was a prevalent topic. The political unrest that overtook the USA during this time is covered realistically. The conflicting feelings, sadness, and mercurial feelings I experienced while reading this book provided a reliving of the angst discussed on nightly newscasts and Zoom calls with friends.

For those of you who read my reviews, and I know you exist cause I got the stats, this series of reviews is a long time coming.

We had an aggressively long holiday break this year, so I decided to get to books I had put off reading, and I went on a theme: blockbuster authors and their pandemic novels. I read in a spring between December 23rd and Jan 3rd Elizabeth's Strout's "Lucy by the Sea", Celeste Ng's "Our Missing Hearts" and Gary Shteyngart's "Our Country Friends". The following is a comparative review based on this sprint. I will say when I started reviewing books in 2019, I had one kid and I could never imagine having three or that there would be a pandemic, or that it would become a trope or device, like "Outsider at Boarding School" or "Something Magical on the Cape" but here we are, 2 more kids and a pandemic later.

I read a lot of Elizbeth Strout. I live in upstate, New York, so I share a lot of the weather her novels capture and I get it. I reread her alot, I just love her. I follow her. I saw her speak and it was profound for me. She is the type of writer I aspire to be if I wanted to be one...one who lived a little first and has some sense and wisdom, What I love most about her books is that they really seem timeless. She mentions certain technologies and what not, but the stories are as if they could be anytime anywhere....any reality Not this one. I was so sad to learn not only did Lucy live in our world, but she was gonna suffer through the pandemic. It was a missed opportunity that of all the places she ended up in Maine, she didn't end up in Olive's house. I felt like this was an end for some of these characters, but maybe a beginning for others? Her novels weave that way. Isabelle moving over the bridge...I think this was more Elizabeth herself reflecting on the pandemic and I always wondered who she was more of, and I guess she is Lucy Barton because her and Lucy share so much of the same history. I'm an Olive. I am a forever bitch and I like birds. Also, not her best, much like Celeste Ng.

I had read a review of this and was interested that it was a fictional exploration of something so recent in memory. Strout takes the reader back to that first panic-- the waiting, the lack of immediate knowledge regarding the severity of the virus itself. Where she reveals her virtuosity is in her beautifully concise paragraphs and how she stacks, or catalogs the paragraphs for the strongest affect. Whether she is making a point, revealing character, or telling details from the past, the way that Strout uses language--the flourish of a sentence in some cases-- wordplay in others -- is beautiful. The narrator leaves the city at the request of her ex-husband and they share a house together in Maine during lockdown. This setting allows the narrator to remember her past life with her husband but through the lens of time having passed and with the backdrop of the virus. Despite the quietness of the circumstances they find themselves in, Strout creates an emotional roaring through her use of memory, the remembrance of past betrayals, and the narrator's desire to move into the future.

I loved reading three of these four books. They do not need to be read in any particular order, and I would recommend starting with book 3 (Oh William!), moving to book 1 (My Name is Lucy Barton), and finishing with book 4 (Lucy by the Sea). Book 1 was lovely and book 3 (Oh William!) is gorgeous. I immediately bought copies of Book 3 for my friends. Book 4 is good enough to read (made better by 1 and 3).

Some people are turned away from this book (4) because of comments about it being conservative-bashing. The main character is liberal living in 2020, and so politics come up… but she seeks out friendships with people who are conservative that she loves and tries to understand. The book is not nearly as strong as book 3 and 1, and you might want to skip it. But it did (lightly) help me process recent events.

That said, I wish I hadn’t read book 2 (Anything is Possible)… it left an ick in my body. Book 2 is the only book of the four where Lucy is barely included, and for me, it didn’t have enough beauty, grace, warmth or connection to make up for the swampy darkness of extreme mental illness.

[spoiler alert]

The creepiest Book 2 chapters were a rapist placing cameras and watching women with his wife and a lunatic trapping an old man in a room and scaring him so bad he had a heart attack.

[end spoiler alert]

Book 3 (Oh William), Book 1 (My Name is Lucy Barton), and Book 4 (Lucy by the Sea) all have pain, but there was enough beauty and tenderness to leave me with a sense of the exquisite wonder of being alive. Of the four, the only ones I’ll keep and read again are 3 & 1.

Recap: for the most impact, consider reading the series in this order: 3, 1, 4, (skip 2).

I bought this book because I saw it on a book list and was intrigued by the pandemic plot and how someone else may have experienced it. After receipt I realized it is the third book in series about a character named Lucy Barton, so I borrowed the previous two books from the library and read them both. I kept hoping I would come to like Lucy or what she made of her life after breaking free of a childhood of poverty .... or at least be intrigued or interested by other characters in the book or plot developments. The other two books were slow-ish (for one she is stuck in a hospital room for many weeks) but I hung in there because I had already bought this book in hardcover and wanted it all to make sense. Finally I was ready to read Lucy By The Sea and honestly after a few chapters I gave up and put it outside in my little lending library for someone more patient than I am to read. I grew to really dislike Lucy as a character and found that she became increasingly more annoying and small minded in each book. While she theoretically had an interesting personal history and career (as a writer living in NYC), she somehow managed to be a total dud. Overall the writing style of the book itself was also so flat, composed of just basic simplistic sentences, devoid of detailed descriptions etc. that I had to stop reading for my own sanity. I thought the concept of quarantining with ones ex husband during the pandemic would be an interesting concept - but not in this book. I'm not sure how so many people adored it or even consider the writing to be worthy of a prize winning writer but clearly I am in the minority on this one. I suggest borrowing it from a library rather than investing in it.

Reading Lucy by the Sea, I was unfortunately brought back to the first year-and-a-half of Covid, as it played out in elite America, and as I watched in horror from Switzerland... the certainty of the "we believe in science" people (which was often different from our science apparently), the hatred and smugness directed upon those that may not have had the luxury of hiding out for a year. Lucy's class constantly stressed how "safe" they were being, all while poorer people did the difficult work of keeping shelves stocked and food delivered. The mask is a central theme of the book, and boy did it become a political and class symbol in the U.S. Where I lived, there weren't 2 sides to a pandemic, and we knew that cloth masks were mostly useless, you didn't need them outside, kids shouldn't wear them, and schools should remain open. But in the U.S., you saw hatred for the small groups protesting lockdowns ("killers!"), while the next week everyone cheered on the mass protests against police without a mention of Covid and outdoor transmission.

So I guess I was disappointed to discover that my favorite character Lucy possessed the same smugness of someone who wears her mask all the time, and even outside, and can't stop talking about it. She won't even hug her kids, she's so virtuous. I guess it is pertinent that Lucy would have been like this, being an anxious coastal, privileged person.

Of course, Lucy was still portrayed as the empathetic character she has always been, and I appreciated that. I must remind myself that if she had questioned the insanity of the time, the audience for the book would probably have hated it and the reviews would have been negative.

This may be the last we see of Lucy and it makes me feel bittersweet and (PLOT SPOILER)...,

I don't think that William deserved her in the end.