There are writers who can use a lot of words to say very little, and there are those who can use few words to speak volumes. Elizabeth Strout is a champion of the latter.
Ms. Strout published her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, in 1998 at the age of 42. She went on to pen several more books, with her breakthrough work being 2008’s Olive Kitteridge – a series of vignettes about the lives of the townspeople in the fictional Crosby, Maine, told primarily through the viewpoint of the titular cantankerous widow.
Olive was my own introduction to Ms. Strout, and while I enjoyed it very much, it didn’t move me at the time to run out and buy up the rest of her bibliography. But then, last year, I stumbled into the world of Lucy Barton.
Lucy, first introduced in Strout’s 2016 novel My Name is Lucy Barton, is perhaps the fictional character I have related to the very most. Timid and self-effacing, warm and judgmental and neurotic and depressive and joyful, she shines through the pages without trying. The book itself barely has a plot; it’s mostly a series of reminisces strung together by connective thoughts, as the eponymous Lucy of the present day recalls her estranged mother visiting her for five days of a weeks-long sojourn in the hospital during the 1980s. Through these recollections, she touches upon themes of deprivation, love, trauma, loneliness, interpersonal relationships, and outsiderhood. Lucy grew up in the rural (and, again, fictional) town of Amgash, Illinois, the youngest of an extremely poor family wherein the parents (her mother a seamstress who is pathologically incapable of expressing affection, her father a World War II veteran unable to talk about the experiences that haunt him because “it wouldn’t be decent”) meted out physical and mental abuse on their three children, who were consequently shunned at school for their odd behaviour and bedraggled appearances. She also talks (among other things) of her marriage and children; of the changing lives of the townsfolk she grew up with; of her overcoming the hurdles of her childhood and becoming a bestselling novelist; and of the AIDS crisis that was raging through New York outside of her hospital window.
I read the followup stories in her series (Anything is Possible, Oh William!, and Lucy By the Sea) and I fell in love with both the creator and the creation. I also adored Abide With Me and Olive, Again, the sequel to Olive’s and her town’s stories, which I found captivating in its intricacies of everyday life.
From an artistic standpoint, Strout can convey so much with simple statements and minimalist prose, and leaves it up to the reader to feel what they may. Many authors weigh down their writing with an overambundance of details in order to make sure that the reader gets it; that they think and know and feel exactly what they, the writer, wish them to. But Strout, like an Impressionist painter, masters complex simplicity. She can naturally toss in a throwaway action, or narrator’s stray thought, and trusts her reader to interpret that as they will, just as they would the words or actions of a neighbour, or a family member, or a passing acquaintance.
Because what touches me most about these stories is how Ms. Strout’s characters are allowed to be so very, painfully human, in all of their varying facets. They can be horrifically flawed, to the point that would cause them to be painted as two-dimensional villains in some other works. But in these writings, nobody is idealised, nor villified. Every character is a world unto themselves, and the look we get inside each – whether as a glimpse or a long visit – is shown to be rich and layered. Her characters are not merely conduits for various viewpoints or traits with which the author may agree or disagree. No-one is ultimately right or wrong; they just feel and think what they do for their own reasons.
Life in Strout’s books, too, is allowed to be both beautiful and terrible, cynical and optimistic in equal measure. They are the opposite of cheap drama; the big significance is in the little details, which are given as much focus and discussion as the capital-E Events. Her characters’ quiet conclusions, particularly those of the introspective Lucy, are often more like inconclusions. At the close of Lucy’s third book, she realises of her erstwhile husband William: “I thought that he made me feel safe, and I wondered why I had thought that, because it made no real sense. But things in life don’t make sense.” Despite this, she goes right back into seeing William in the protector role at the start of the next book, when the Covid-19 pandemic hits and he once again takes the reins to keep the bufuddled Lucy safe. Rather than being frustrating or unsatisfying, these feel right for the journeys we’ve travelled on alongside these people. They feel earned and real and lived-in.
What I mean is this: these books can have lessons and learnings, without a sense of closed-loop finality. People’s journeys can be cyclical and regressive, and there will always be new outlooks collected along the way and subtle changes unlocked, but there is no big finish, no (un)happily-ever-after, until the end. Life rolls on, as turbulent and beautiful as the waves beneath the cliffs of Crosby, Maine.
For this reason, each subsequent book in their respective series feels more like a chapter of real life than an unnecessary sequel. There’s no feeling of reopening a finished story and overriding a grand finale. It’s just another chapter of life, loping along as life does.
The Pin and the Pen 