Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel opens with an image of the Chrysler Building whose “geometric brilliance of lights” was visible from the narrator’s bed during a hospital stay in the mid-1980s.
The hospital stay lasted nine weeks, but the novel is structured around the five days when the narrator’s mother came to visit, sleeping each night in a chair at the foot of her daughter’s bed. Lucy hadn’t seen her mother for years before the day she turned up at the hospital “where the Chrysler Building shone outside the window”.
The Chrysler Building appears at different points in the book, always in luminous terms: shining, a “constellation”, a “beacon” of “the largest and best hopes for mankind and its aspirations and desire for beauty”. In this powerful and exquisite novel, Strout never loses sight of light or beauty, even as she explores the complex territory of a family whose traumas have become layered and compacted.
Among Strout's previously published books are Olive Kitteridge, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Premio Bancarella Prize, and Amy and Isabelle, which won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
My Name is Lucy Barton is longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. It is told in language that is clear, honest and direct. Several times the narrator, Lucy, makes reference to the act of "recording", rather than "writing" or "telling", and there is a sense of quiet urgency, a concentration on the accuracy of her recollections.
Strout’s prose is assured and precise as she details the narrator’s struggles with memory: her own and other people’s. Poignantly, Lucy says: “I have no memory of my mother ever kissing me. She may have kissed me though; I may be wrong.”
And on recalling her mother’s pronouncement on the ending of a neighbour’s marriage, she says: “But maybe that wasn’t what my mother said.” There is no attempt at point-scoring against her mother, only a desire to provide true and exact testimony.
The narrator describes growing up in Amgash, Illinois, a tiny rural town where, as well as being poor, the family were considered “oddities”. Until she was 11, they lived in a garage next door to a great-uncle’s house, moving into the house when he died. They had “hot water and a flush toilet” then, but it was still cold.
The house was isolated, down a dirt road amid corn and soybean fields. There was also isolation of a psychological kind: no books, newspapers or television and, at school, the narrator and her siblings were told that their family stank.
There was abuse and hardship. At the heart of the novel is the mother-daughter relationship, which Strout explores in a way that is unsentimental and unsparing and, at the same time, hugely compassionate. Here is a mother who struck her children without warning, “impulsively and vigorously”, who, when her daughter’s breasts began to develop, told her that she looked like one of the neighbour’s cows.
She is also a woman with a curious take on offering comfort; during her hospital visit she shares stories of sad and failed marriages, of ruined lives, going on to advise that her daughter, too, will have marriage trouble. But Sarah Payne, the writer whose workshop Lucy attends, declares emphatically that “this is a story about love”.
Lucy’s attempts to extract from her mother an admission of love are heartrending, as is her mother’s seeming inability to provide it, in any direct fashion at least. But, against all odds, their exchanges are, in their own way, often uplifting. Strout navigates these mother-daughter conversations in prose that is finely tuned and unerring, harnessing the power of the unsaid as well as the said. She never lets the light go out.
The novel’s main focus is the relationship between Lucy and her mother, but the reader also witnesses something of the complex relationship she has with her siblings. “We were equally friendless and equally scorned,” she says of herself and her sister Vicky, “and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we eyed the rest of the world.”
With regard to her brother and sister, Lucy appears to suffer something akin to survivor’s guilt; she questions what she terms her own “ruthlessness”.
“How Vicky managed, to this day I don’t know,” she says, and she sends Vicki money for things the children need or want. “I think she feels she is owed the money by me,” she says, “and I think she may be right.”
And while the narrator tells us that “this is not the story of my marriage”, there are also insights into the dynamics of her relationship with her husband, William, and her daughters Chrissie and Becka.
Strout has said, “It is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that interests me as a writer, but the murkiness of human experience and the consistent imperfections of our lives.”
When Lucy writes to her mother after hospital, she replies on a card showing the Chrysler Building at night. “Maybe it was the darkness with only the pale crack of light that came through the door,” Lucy says earlier in the novel, “the constellation of the magnificent Chrysler Building right beyond us, that allowed us to speak in ways we never had.”
This is a magnificent book, one that explores much hurt and darkness without ever relinquishing its compassion or its light. Danielle McLaughlin is the author of Dinosaurs on Other Planets
