Lucy and the Sea, the last work of Elizabeth Strout (Portland, 1956), is a delicious novel. Lucy and William have been divorced for years. She remarried and was widowed. He contracted two more marriages that also failed. The former couple has had a friendly relationship for a long time and the life events of their two daughters in common, now adults, independent with their own partners, Crissy and Becka, weave a particular family framework.
The central character, the writer Lucy Barton, burst into our lives a few years ago, in 2016, in My name is Lucy Barton. The image of that woman in her thirties recovering from an operation in a New York hospital bed, late at night, with the Chrysler tower illuminated in the background in the window, remains in all of us who have gone through those pages. She and her childhood of her hardships in a Chicago town, the mother with whom there was no good connection, an ex-husband and two daughters those days in his care, who has another woman.
In fiction, three decades have passed – there was a preview of the maturity of the characters in Oh, William!, published last year – and the old marriage will live together again. William, who is a scientist, has decided to get Lucy out of New York when the pandemic begins to give unstoppable warning signs. He has rented a house in a small town in Maine, surrounded by cliffs and with the sea as a backdrop.
What Strout does with these elements is to embroider a continuity story –there are references to previous biographical episodes of the characters, old acquaintances from his literary universe such as Olive Kitteridge or Bob Burgess, also the town of Crosby– and immerse us in an unprecedented experience, unexpected, surprising and disturbing, which will force you to relate and communicate in an alternative way.
The author drags us with her narration into a field of pure fiction that nevertheless reproduces so many experiences that we have lived these last three years. Strout has an extraordinary ability to capture our attention with such familiar wicks. She does it with rhythm, with clean prose and rich simplicity.
The dosing of information about the virus and its consequences is perfect, as is that referring to US politics – the ways of the president or the assault on the Capitol – and social movements – the demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd. All these portions of reality are inserted in the history of this extended family, with all its ramifications, which brings wounds and losses (“We are all confined, continuously, we just don’t know it”) and with life, which despite a pandemic, continues in each of them.
This novel flows as if it were a conversation with a lifelong friend, where no filters or censorship are applied, in a tone that alternates between confidentiality and the freedom to wander from time to time – activates here and there sensors that they fire jets from which small stories of secondary characters sprout, all rich and interesting. There is a familiar language, deeply worked characters, shared codes and a lot of real life –from the clogged drain in the shower to the adverse perception of shoes in the room or dental floss.
The work takes place far from the madding crowd – if the bet was simplicity, perhaps Lucy in Maine would have been an appropriate title – but the New York that saves and fascinates the protagonist is also a constant reference (“it seemed strange to me that the world of New York was still so beautiful while so many people were dying.” As are her insecurities, her motherhood, her care and maturity. Nice to meet you, Lucy Barton.
Elizabeth Strout Lucy and the sea / La Lucy a la vora del mar Trad. to the Spanish of F. Casas and to the Catalan of N. Busquets. Alfaguara / 1984
232 / 288 pages. €19.90
