My name is Lucy Barton A novel

Review by New York Times Review

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. Strout's novel shows that what is incommunicable can not only isolate but bind.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 13, 2015]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Lucy Barton recalls her months-long stay in the hospital after suffering complications during a routine appendectomy. Her husband, overwhelmed with job and child-care responsibilities, summons Lucy's mother to stay with her, though they have long been estranged. Within the confines of her hospital room, Lucy and her mother seek to find common ground, gossiping about the neighbors in the small, rural town of Amgash, Illinois, where Lucy was raised. In this way, they avoid talking about the central event of Lucy's life, her impoverished childhood. Obliquely, the harsh details are revealed: Lucy was frequently hungry, dirty, and terrorized by her abusive father. She felt isolated, ashamed, and fearful, feelings that still surface in adulthood. It seems a small miracle that she escaped to college, got married, had children, and became a writer while her siblings remained mired in dysfunction. She never confronts her mother about the fact that she failed to protect Lucy; indeed, though they seem incapable of expressing it, their love for each other is palpable. In a compact novel brimming with insight and emotion, Strout relays with great tenderness and sadness the way family relationships can both make and break us. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Anticipation will be high for a new novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2015 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Author Strout and reader Farr have produced a masterly fusion of material that could easily have become maudlin but never does. It is a simple, yet deep depiction of the fierce love and intense pain of a mother-daughter relationship. At the request of her unavailable husband, Lucy's mother, whom she has not seen for many years, comes to sit beside the bed of her hospitalized daughter. Lucy speaks openly of the poverty and shame of her childhood, and the family dynamics emerge beneath the dialogue and in the silences between the lines. Listeners reel with Lucy's shifting moods, her intense love for her own two daughters, her loneliness, and her growing insight into her family dynamics. Strout has written so beautifully of the inseparable bond between mother and daughter that listeners will be compelled to contemplate their own childhood in a new light. A Random House hardcover. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Many years earlier, Lucy Barton spent two months in a hospital after a routine appendectomy; no one ever figured out what was wrong. She wakes one morning to find her mother sitting on her bed, arrived in Manhattan from their rural Illinois hometown. Too many years have passed since mother and daughter have even been in the same room, and yet their conversations work hard to avoid the personal, gossiping and laughing about friends and neighbors rather than sharing intimacies between themselves. The very air in Lucy's room becomes achingly dense with all that goes unsaid-both women so desperately lonely, both so heavy with love and need for each other. Strout's (Olive Kitteridge) latest title is a haunting portrait of an artist as a young woman and what she fled, endured, and hoped for on her remarkable journey toward becoming a writer. Kimberly Farr's deliberate, measured narration gives Lucy dignity and grace, never succumbing to a hint of self-pity. The unflinching strength of Strout's writing finds equal fortitude in Farr's lucid, thoughtful voice. VERDICT With Strout's exalted reputation, library patrons will be queuing impatiently to get to know Lucy Barton. Watch for Lucy on upcoming literary prize short lists and best-of compilations. ["In a book worthy of her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive -Kitteridge, Strout again writes empathically as she explores core issues of class and the parent-child relationship": LJ Xpress Reviews 12/18/15 starred review of the Random hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, -Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

From Pulitzer Prize-winning Strout (The Burgess Boys, 2013, etc.), a short, stark novel about the ways we break and maintain the bonds of family. The eponymous narrator looks back to the mid-1980s, when she goes into the hospital for an appendix removal and succumbs to a mysterious fever that keeps her there for nine weeks. The possible threat to her life brings Lucy's mother, from whom she has been estranged for years, to her bedsidebut not the father whose World War II-related trauma is largely responsible for clever Lucy's fleeing her impoverished family for college and life as a writer. She marries a man from a comfortable background who can't ever quite quiet her demons; his efforts to bridge the gap created by their wildly different upbringings occupy some of the novel's saddest pages. As in Olive Kittredge (2008), Strout peels back layers of denial and self-protective brusqueness to reveal the love that Lucy's mother feels but cannot express. In fewer than 200 intense, dense pages, she considers class prejudice, the shame that poverty brings, the AIDS epidemic, and the healing powersand the limitsof art. Most of all, this is a story of mothers and daughters: Lucy's ambivalent feelings for the mother who failed to protect her are matched by her own guilt for leaving the father of her two girls, who have never entirely forgiven her. Later sections, in which Lucy's dying mother tells her "I need you to leave" and the father who brutalized her says, "What a good girl you've always been," are almost unbearably moving, with their pained recognition that the mistakes we make are both irreparable and subject to repentance. The book does feel a bit abbreviated, but that's only because the characters and ideas are so compelling we want to hear more from the author who has limned them so sensitively. Fiction with the condensed power of poetry: Strout deepens her mastery with each new work, and her psychological acuity has never required improvement. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks. This was in New York City, and at night a view of the Chrysler Building, with its geometric brilliance of lights, was directly visible from my bed. During the day, the building's beauty receded, and gradually it became simply one more large structure against a blue sky, and all the city's buildings seemed remote, silent, far away. It was May, and then June, and I remember how I would stand and look out the window at the sidewalk below and watch the young women--my age--in their spring clothes, out on their lunch breaks; I could see their heads moving in conversation, their blouses rippling in the breeze. I thought how when I got out of the hospital I would never again walk down the sidewalk without giving thanks for being one of those people, and for many years I did that--I would remember the view from the hospital window and be glad for the sidewalk I was walking on. To begin with, it was a simple story: I had gone into the hospital to have my appendix out. After two days they gave me food, but I couldn't keep it down. And then a fever arrived. No one could isolate any bacteria or figure out what had gone wrong. No one ever did. I took fluids through one IV, and antibiotics came through another. They were attached to a metal pole on wobbly wheels that I pushed around with me, but I got tired easily. Toward the beginning of July, whatever problem had taken hold of me went away. But until then I was in a very strange state--a literally feverish waiting--and I really agonized. I had a husband and two small daughters at home; I missed my girls terribly, and I worried about them so much I was afraid it was making me sicker. When my doctor, to whom I felt a deep attachment--he was a jowly-faced Jewish man who wore such a gentle sadness on his shoulders, whose grandparents and three aunts, I heard him tell a nurse, had been killed in the camps, and who had a wife and four grown children here in New York City--this lovely man, I think, felt sorry for me, and saw to it that my girls--they were five and six--could visit me if they had no illnesses. They were brought into my room by a family friend, and I saw how their little faces were dirty, and so was their hair, and I pushed my IV apparatus into the shower with them, but they cried out, "Mommy, you're so skinny!" They were really frightened. They sat with me on the bed while I dried their hair with a towel, and then they drew pictures, but with apprehension, meaning that they did not interrupt themselves every minute by saying, "Mommy, Mommy, do you like this? Mommy, look at the dress of my fairy princess!" They said very little, the younger one especially seemed unable to speak, and when I put my arms around her, I saw her lower lip thrust out and her chin tremble; she was a tiny thing, trying so hard to be brave. When they left I did not look out the window to watch them walk away with my friend who had brought them, and who had no children of her own. My husband, naturally, was busy running the household and also busy with his job, and he didn't often have a chance to visit me. He had told me when we met that he hated hospitals--his father had died in one when he was fourteen--and I saw now that he meant this. In the first room I had been assigned was an old woman dying next to me; she kept calling out for help--it was striking to me how uncaring the nurses were, as she cried that she was dying. My husband could not stand it--he could not stand visiting me there, is what I mean--and he had me moved to a single room. Our health insurance didn't cover this luxury, and every day was a drain on our savings. I was grateful not to hear that poor woman crying out, but had anyone known the extent of my loneliness I would have been embarrassed. Whenever a nurse came to take my temperature, I tried to get her to stay for a few minutes, but the nurses were busy, they could not just hang around talking. About three weeks after I was admitted, I turned my eyes from the window late one afternoon and found my mother sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed. "Mom?" I said. "Hi, Lucy," she said. Her voice sounded shy but urgent. She leaned forward and squeezed my foot through the sheet. "Hi, Wizzle," she said. I had not seen my mother for years, and I kept staring at her; I could not figure out why she looked so different. "Mom, how did you get here?" I asked. "Oh, I got on an airplane." She wiggled her fingers, and I knew that there was too much emotion for us. So I waved back, and lay flat. "I think you'll be all right," she added, in the same shy-sounding but urgent voice. "I haven't had any dreams." Her being there, using my pet name, which I had not heard in ages, made me feel warm and liquid-filled, as though all my tension had been a solid thing and now was not. Usually I woke at midnight and dozed fitfully, or stared wide-awake through the window at the lights of the city. But that night I slept without waking, and in the morning my mother was sitting where she had been the day before. "Doesn't matter," she said when I asked. "You know I don't sleep lots." The nurses offered to bring her a cot, but she shook her head. Every time a nurse offered to bring her a cot, she shook her head. After a while, the nurses stopped asking. My mother stayed with me five nights, and she never slept but in her chair. During our first full day together my mother and I talked intermittently; I think neither of us quite knew what to do. She asked me a few questions about my girls, and I answered with my face becoming hot. "They're amazing," I said. "Oh, they're just amazing." About my husband, my mother asked nothing, even though--he told me this on the telephone--he was the one who had called her and asked her to come be with me, who had paid her airfare, who had offered to pick her up at the airport--my mother, who had never been in an airplane before. In spite of her saying she would take a taxi, in spite of her refusal to see him face-to-face, my husband had still given her guidance and money to get to me. Now, sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed, my mother also said nothing about my father, and so I said nothing about him either. I kept wishing she would say "Your father hopes you get better," but she did not. "Was it scary getting a taxi, Mom?" She hesitated, and I felt that I saw the terror that must have visited her when she stepped off the plane. But she said, "I have a tongue in my head, and I used it." After a moment I said, "I'm really glad you're here." She smiled quickly and looked toward the window. This was the middle of the 1980s, before cellphones, and when the beige telephone next to my bed rang and it was my husband--my mother could tell, I'm sure, by the pitiful way I said "Hi," as though ready to weep--my mother would quietly rise from her chair and leave the room. I suppose during those times she found food in the cafeteria, or called my father from a pay phone down the hall, since I never saw her eat, and since I assumed my father wondered over her safety--there was no problem, as far as I understood it, between them--and after I had spoken to each child, kissing the phone mouthpiece a dozen times, then lying back onto the pillow and closing my eyes, my mother would slip back into the room, for when I opened my eyes she would be there. That first day we spoke of my brother, the eldest of us three siblings, who, unmarried, lived at home with my parents, though he was thirty-six, and of my older sister, who was thirty-four and who lived ten miles from my parents, with five children and a husband. I asked if my brother had a job. "He has no job," my mother said. "He spends the night with any animal that will be killed the next day." I asked her what she had said, and she repeated what she had said. She added, "He goes into the Pedersons' barn, and he sleeps next to the pigs that will be taken to slaughter." I was surprised to hear this, and I said so, and my mother shrugged. Then my mother and I talked about the nurses; my mother named them right away: "Cookie," for the skinny one who was crispy in her affect; "Toothache," for the woebegone older one; "Serious Child," for the Indian woman we both liked. But I was tired, and so my mother started telling me stories of people she had known years before. She talked in a way I didn't remember, as though a pressure of feeling and words and observations had been stuffed down inside her for years, and her voice was breathy and unselfconscious. Sometimes I dozed off, and when I woke I would beg her to talk again. But she said, "Oh, Wizzle-dee, you need your rest." "I am resting! Please, Mom. Tell me something. Tell me anything. Tell me about Kathie Nicely. I always loved her name." "Oh yes. Kathie Nicely. Goodness, she came to a bad end." We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois, where there were other homes that were run-down and lacking fresh paint or shutters or gardens, no beauty for the eye to rest upon. These houses were grouped together in what was the town, but our house was not near them. While it is said that children accept their circumstances as normal, both Vicky and I understood that we were different. We were told on the playground by other children, "Your family stinks," and they'd run off pinching their noses with their fingers; my sister was told by her second-grade teacher--in front of the class--that being poor was no excuse for having dirt behind the ears, no one was too poor to buy a bar of soap. My father worked on farm machinery, though he was often getting fired for disagreeing with the boss, then getting rehired again, I think because he was good at the work and would be needed once more. My mother took in sewing: A hand-painted sign, where our long driveway met the road, announced SEWING AND ALTERATIONS. And though my father, when he said our prayers with us at night, made us thank God that we had enough food, the fact is I was often ravenous, and what we had for supper many nights was molasses on bread. Telling a lie and wasting food were always things to be punished for. Otherwise, on occasion and without warning, my parents--and it was usually my mother and usually in the presence of our father--struck us impulsively and vigorously, as I think some people may have suspected by our splotchy skin and sullen dispositions. And there was isolation. We lived in the Sauk Valley Area, where you can go for a long while seeing only one or two houses surrounded by fields, and as I have said, we didn't have houses near us. We lived with cornfields and fields of soybeans spreading to the horizon; and yet beyond the horizon was the Pedersons' pig farm. In the middle of the cornfields stood one tree, and its starkness was striking. For many years I thought that tree was my friend; it was my friend. Our home was down a very long dirt road, not far from the Rock River, near some trees that were windbreaks for the cornfields. So we did not have any neighbors nearby. And we did not have a television and we did not have newspapers or magazines or books in the house. The first year of her marriage, my mother had worked at the local library, and apparently--my brother later told me this--loved books. But then the library told my mother the regulations had changed, they could only hire someone with a proper education. My mother never believed them. She stopped reading, and many years went by before she went to a different library in a different town and brought home books again. I mention this because there is the question of how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act in it. How, for example, do you learn that it is impolite to ask a couple why they have no children? How do you set a table? How do you know if you are chewing with your mouth open if no one has ever told you? How do you even know what you look like if the only mirror in the house is a tiny one high above the kitchen sink, or if you have never heard a living soul say that you are pretty, but rather, as your breasts develop, are told by your mother that you are starting to look like one of the cows in the Pedersons' barn? How Vicky managed, to this day I don't know. We were not as close as you might expect; we were equally friendless and equally scorned, and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we eyed the rest of the world. There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too--unexpected--when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don't know how others are. So much of life seems speculation. Excerpted from My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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