READING LUCY BY THE SEA BY ELIZABETH STROUT

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout is a sweet, sad book, set in ‘this sweet sad place we call Earth’, as written in its last line. It is short and slow, readable and occasionally tiresome. It is set among older, white, East Coast North Americans and their adult children. It is full of their First World woes. Not that the woes of miscarriages and relationship breakdowns are to be disregarded, but if context in a novel matters, then the context here is benign, even with the ravages of Covid 19 close at hand. Thus the woes are diminished.

The novel sits in the second of two traditions cleverly described by Colm Tóibín in his essay Losing the Plot. Tóibín suggests stories are either driven by plot, with actions and their consequences, or stories work by creating an atmosphere through language, its rhythms and textures. Lucy by the Sea is in the second silo. That will determine a reader’s response to it.

The language is conversational, as Lucy talks directly to the reader.

Here is is a story about people we met through Margaret and Bob. 

But let me mention some sad things that happened before the event, … 

I noticed that I did not feel sad.

I do think this: I do think it was the happiest I have been in my life.

This gives the book a disarmingly child-like tone. The title reminds the reader of children’s books. Strout’s conversational style enables her to be candid and intimate in her presentation of the characters and the richness of the small world she creates for them. There are echoes of the work of John Updike in Couples.

Lucy by the Sea is a pandemic novel, infused by the sensibilities of the well-off. Lucy, and other successful writers, have the means to flee New York, when the city locks down in March 2020, often to coastal colonies, cocktails in hand, with the siren calls of mass plague well behind them.

There’s not much vigour in Lucy’s rambling musings of fragility and regret. She recognises she is ageing and becoming aged, as are the people closest to her. She is self-absorbed, turning inward, to savour her own exceptionalism. Just like her country at this time.

Any notion of characterising this novel as an example of ‘the local being universal’ is unfounded. Unless the reader accepts that life in the USA is universally human in a way that life in Indonesia, Zambia, Brazil or Spain is not. I doubt Arundhati Roy will right a novel, where she and her family escape from a pandemic by moving down the coast from Mumbai, detaching themselves from the context of the plague happening all around. 

When Lucy yearns for New York and her previous life, she mourns less for the city’s Covid victims and more for her lost loves and her good life. Isolated yet secure, she ponders her current good fortune, while failing to connect it to her impoverished origins.

She knows that some people are luckier than others. She has no answer as to why this is so.

“The question of why some people are luckier than others,” Lucy observes. “I have no answer for this.” 

This may be disarming, but it is also tiresome and disingenuous.

The reliance on luck – fortune – without any sense of context, confirms the novel’s immaturity. Lucy and her fellows are child-like, cocooned by their privilege. They are ‘un-present’, except in their cocoon.

Strout’s work is prize-winning and she is lionised. There is a vibrant market for her novels. Principal characters overlap between her books. They are hugely successful, commercially and critically. The friend, who pointed me at her work, suggested I read Olive Ketteridge. I’m not sure. I’ll certainly have a few reads in between. Something by Barbara Kingsolver perhaps.

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout? Recommended? If you fancy something sweet, sad and self-involved. It won’t scare the horses in the paddock outside.

Lucy by the Sea; book; Elizabeth Strout, Penguin/Viking, London, 2023

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