Lucy by the Sea
By Elizabeth Strout
Published 2022
Read March 2023
By now you may be aware that this reader reads everything by Elizabeth Strout. This essay’s posting date so long after its reading shouldn’t imply any negative connotations about this reader’s opinion of it—merely the usual problem of reading faster than the essays get written.
This novel continues our interaction with Lucy Barton. She first appeared in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) then in Anything is Possible (2017) and again in Oh William(2021). Now we see Lucy Barton about 20 years after her divorce from Wiliam, her first husband of about 20 years, as a fairly newly widowed from her second husband, whom she adored, and at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. William, divorced from his second wife, is a scientist and sees the writing on the wall regarding this new disease. He convinces Lucy to go to a house he rented in Maine. She’s reluctant to leave her beloved New York where her children reside. She plans to take only her iPad, despite being a writer by occupation. William packs her laptop as he knows this isn’t going to be as short a stay as Lucy imagines.
They settle into this rented house which is near Crosby, Maine, a town Strout readers have visited in other books. In fact, their house is pretty near Bob Burgess’s place and Lucy and Bob become walking friends. Other past characters have cameo appearances but reading any of the previous Strout books is unnecessary to appreciate this novel.
This book is definitely about the Covid-19 pandemic—how people approached it, their fears, their reaction to being cooped up in their homes, their longings for family and friends they aren’t seeing, etc. But it also is a book like other Strout books—about relationships. In this one, it’s about Lucy mourning her husband David, finding a new friend in Bob Burgess, worrying about her grown kids, and sharing living quarters with an ex-husband.
It’s classic Elizabeth Strout and this reader enjoyed every word of it.
MarshaReads.com 