I made the mistake of reading of a review of this book (something I rarely do) by Claire Messud from the New York Times and realized it was so spot on and I had to publish it on my blog. So here it is...enjoy. I did. And read the book!
"One of this nation’s most abiding myths is that social origins don’t matter. Each of us is Gatsby, or can be, with the potential to be reinvented and obliterate the past. This is nowhere more true than in New York City, where, surrounded by millions, each person supposedly stands upon his or her own merits. If we reach a sophisticated urban consensus on how to speak, how to dress, how to live, then who will know what lies beneath the surface? Who will know what any one of us might really mean by words like “home,” “childhood” or “love”?
Elizabeth Strout is a writer bracingly unafraid of silences, her vision of the world northern, Protestant and flinty. “Olive Kitteridge,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of linked stories, gives life to a woman both fierce and thwarted, hampered in her passions at once by rage and a sense of propriety. The narrator of Strout’s powerful and melancholy new novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” might be a distant relation of Olive’s, though she is raised in poverty outside the small town of Amgash, Ill., rather than in Maine, and her adult home, where most of the novel takes place, is in Manhattan.
Lucy is a writer — words are her vocation — and yet she, like Olive, hovers at the edge of the sayable, attempting to articulate experiences that have never been and, without the force of her will, might never be expressed. She says she decided in the third grade to be a writer after reading about a girl named Tilly, “who was strange and unattractive because she was dirty and poor.” Books “brought me things,” she explains. “They made me feel less alone. This is my point. And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone!”
Lucy Barton’s story is, in meaningful ways, about loneliness, about an individual’s isolation when her past — all that has formed her — is invisible and incommunicable to those around her. Like the fictional Tilly, she endured a childhood of hardship, shunned even by her Amgash classmates, living in a world incomprehensible to her adult friends in New York. Not only did the family have little heat and little food, they had no books, no magazines and no TV: There was a lot for Lucy to catch up on.
Hers is also, though, a simple love story, about a girl’s unquestioning, almost animal love for her mother, and her mother’s love in return; about how what is invisible and incommunicable is not only what isolates but also what binds.
Lucy’s account, told many years later, primarily records a five-day visit from her mother when Lucy was hospitalized with a mysterious infection for almost nine weeks in New York in the mid-1980s. At the time, Lucy had a husband and two small daughters, ages 5 and 6, but she had been largely estranged from her parents since her marriage. We learn that her father — a World War II veteran whose agonies and aggressions remain somewhat oblique, but who would be described in traditional parlance as having had a “bad war” — can’t abide the fact that Lucy’s husband is of German extraction, with “blond German looks” to match.
Over the course of Lucy’s mother’s unexpected stay, the older woman remains in the hospital room with her daughter, taking only occasional catnaps. (“You learn to, when you don’t feel safe,” she observes, prompting Lucy to reflect, “I know very little about my mother’s childhood.”) They pass the time making up nicknames for the nurses and gossiping cheerfully about the fates of some of the girls and women from Amgash Lucy knew in her youth: snooty Kathie Nicely, who fell in love with a schoolteacher (who turned out to be gay) and then was shunned by her husband and daughters; Cousin Harriet, who “had that very poor luck with her marriage” and was left to raise her children as an impoverished young widow; Marilyn Somebody, married to a man who, sent almost immediately to fight in Vietnam, “had to do some terrible stuff, and . . . he’s never been the same”; or Mary Mumford, a.k.a. Mississippi Mary, who married well and seemed to have it all, but upon discovering her husband’s long-term affair with his secretary suffered a heart attack.
In discussing these narratives, they circle around those things they can’t broach openly. They don’t talk about Lucy’s father’s episodes, “what as a child I had called — to myself — the Thing, meaning an incident of my father becoming very anxious and not in control of himself”; or about the fact that Lucy’s parents struck their children “impulsively and vigorously”; or about her terror of being locked in her father’s truck and her horror at even hearing the word “snake.” They don’t discuss why Lucy’s brother still lives at home and reads children’s books, or why “he goes into the Pedersons’ barn, and he sleeps next to the pigs that will be taken to slaughter.” And, above all, they don’t talk about Lucy’s present life in New York, about the stories she’s published or her young family and new friends.
Lucy, exhilarated simply by her mother’s presence — “I was so happy. Oh, I was happy speaking with my mother this way!” — has, at least many years later, made her peace with all that their conversations elided and, it would seem, with the pain associated with the unsayable and the unsaid. “I have asked experts,” she reflects. “Their answers have been thoughtful, and almost always the same: I don’t know what your mother remembered. I like these experts because they seem decent, and because I feel I know a true sentence when I hear one now. They do not know what my mother remembered. I don’t know what my mother remembered either.
Strout articulates for her readers — albeit often circumspectly, perhaps the only way — the Gordian knot of family, binding together fear and misery, solace and love. Lucy Barton, although still a young woman in her hospital bed, is already far from the hardscrabble silences of rural Amgash; but in her uncertain illness nothing can console her like her mother’s presence — “It was the sound of my mother’s voice I most wanted; what she said didn’t matter.” In a moment of crucial directness, Lucy explains: “I feel that people may not understand that my mother could never say the words I love you. I feel that people may not understand: It was all right.”
Interspersed with Lucy’s memories of these precious five days are intimations of her marriage and its ultimate failure, along with portraits of her beloved doctor and her friends and mentors at the time — in particular a neighbor named Jeremy, who dies of AIDS, and a writer and teacher named Sarah Payne. These are the people who see Lucy as an artist, giving her a new sense of belonging, and, in Sarah’s case, exhorting her to look unflinchingly at a story. “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece,” Sarah tells her, “remember this: You’re not doing it right.”
Whether Strout once had a literary guide like Sarah Payne (an imperfect guide, flawed as are all these beautifully too-human characters) or whether she herself has been one, her fiction certainly enacts the fierce clarity of vision Payne demands: There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, “My Name Is Lucy Barton” offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to — “I was so happy. Oh, I was happy” — simple joy."
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