Beloved character Lucy Barton is back – and she’s looking for answers

FICTION: Oh William!, Elizabeth Strout, Viking, $29.99

Elizabeth Strout masterfully describes the missing parts of people and relationships. Fans of the redoubtable Olive Kitteridge, the main stay of two of Strout’s most popular books, sometimes wonder how such a joyless and unbending character managed to win their hearts.

Olive seems as tough as the landscape of her native Maine, Strout’s heartland. She is unable ever to say sorry. But the pain in her life is so real that readers see beyond the no-nonsense layer of self-protection, especially when it comes to her estrangement from her son and her relationship with two inadequate husbands. At the conclusion of Olive, Again, she writes “I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.” To borrow a famous image, Olive is a net made of holes sewn together.

Elizabeth Strout’s story in Oh William! unfolds with a brutal delicacy.Credit: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

Lucy Barton is Strout’s other recurrent female character of mature years and bears some similarities to Olive Kitteridge. Like Olive, she has lost two husbands. Like Olive, her pain runs in deep veins right back to her childhood. But Lucy Barton’s heart is closer to the surface, her language more tender, her opinions and reactions more malleable. Olive and Lucy are yin and yang, water and stone. Lucy often says things like “then there was this”. Olive is seldom so outwardly tentative. But like Olive, Lucy is made from missing parts.

Oh William!, the third Lucy Barton book, is centred on Lucy’s first husband, a scientist, with whom she had two daughters. We met William on the sidelines of My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) when Lucy wakes in a New York hospital to find her mother, whom she has not seen for many years, sitting at the foot of the bed. Like Marilynne Robinson, Strout elaborately embroiders a small but complete world.

William has arranged this reunion, despite being made totally unwelcome in the Barton household, a shack on the fringe of a small town in rural Illinois. Lucy’s father returned from the Second World War with debilitating PTSD. She grew up without any experience of nurture until a kindly teacher paved the way for her to go to college, parachuting her into another world.

Credit:

Oh William! deals with a later time, following the death of Lucy’s second husband, David. William Gerhardt is now onto his third wife. During his marriage to Lucy, he had numerous affairs, including with a character from Strout’s book The Burgess Boys (2013). Now Lucy starts thinking that William was the only person with whom she ever felt safe. “He is the only home I ever had.” It seems possible for a time that they might come back together, fragments trying to make themselves whole by pasting themselves onto another. It turns out that William wants Lucy’s help more than he wants her.

William’s mother, Catherine, came from circumstances in rural Maine almost as tough as Lucy’s. She left her first husband for William’s father, a man who had fought on the other side of the war to Lucy’s own dad. He made money in the war in circumstances that are never explained but cast a shadow.

In this new book, William discovers that his mother had a child with her first husband. That half-sister is still alive. The journey that William and Lucy undertake to fill some gaps is told with sublime understatement. Compassion and irritability perform a kind of ballet. The pair spend time in separate rooms in cheap hotels before summoning what it takes to confront a hollow past. It doesn’t turn out close to what either of them had hoped. The story unfolds with what you might call brutal delicacy.

Oh William! is a soulful book about searching for something that refuses to be found, even when it is right in your face. Elizabeth Strout handles the existential questions that lurk within mundane failures with a skill that is matched by few others. As Annie Proulx has dug beneath the crust of Wyoming, so too is Elizabeth Strout’s Maine a place you’d be sorry to miss.

Michael McGirr’s Ideas to Save My Life will be published by Text in November.

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.