Lucy by the Sea

By Elizabeth Strout, Random House, 2022, 288 pages
Reviewed by Angela Allen, February 25, 2023

I love Elizabeth Strout and have read every one of her novels, not that they are hard to read.

She writes economically with spare, simple prose. Her characters are never overreachers, though they are a bit unconventional. They are usually soft-spoken, uninventive, everyday commonplace folk — but they’re quirky, and they have insights. They’re interconnected book by book. They grow and change and evolve.

Think of Olive in “Olive Kitteridge” and William in “Oh William!” And now there’s Lucy in “Lucy by the Sea.” We’ve seen her in other novels, including in “My Name Is Lucy Barton.” Strout portrays her as another deceptively strong but understated character.

“Lucy by the Sea” takes place during Covid beginning in 2020 and continues through months of the virus. At the start, many people escaped, Lucy included, from New York City to less-populated places like Maine, and in Lucy’s case, remained there. There is constant tension about “staying safe,” and we can all relate to that.

Lucy’s ex-husband, William (of “Oh, William!”), insists that she leave New York with him and find refuge on the coast of Maine. Her husband after William, a cellist, has died, and she has been living alone. Lucy is a writer who portrays her unfortunate past. She was very poor and endured an awful mother, and she invents a new mother to help her navigate her present life. But her past comes back to haunt her in her books and in her present.

As the world is falling apart, and several people close to her die, she and William realize how much they care about each other and gain a new balance. They decide to stay together, though God knows they’ve experienced years of difficulties with each other, including his affairs and marriage to a much younger woman and now the presence of a very young daughter living elsewhere. This time, better understanding and more adjustment prevail, and, well, life changes, especially in the midst of worldwide crisis.

At first, Lucy doesn’t really get the severity of the virus — William does; he’s a scientist — but she trusts him enough and follows his lead. Once in Maine, she is at sea, as much as she is by the the sea, but eventually she regains her self-possession and begins to read and write again and to make friends very much unlike her.

Though she comes off as shy, withdrawn, unassertive, fragile, and easy to push around for much of the book — and her and William’s adult daughters blow her off when she asks them questions or tries to understand their lives — she steps into her own by the end. She straightens out one daughter who is about to dive into an affair and potentially ruin her marriage. Lucy always says she doesn’t know much, but in the end her daughters agree with one another: Mom, you know a lot.

I love characters who are quiet and wise and wry under all the layers. I love authors who play the cello rather than the violin and reach deeply without making a big deal of it.

Strout has won a ton of prizes, including a Pulitzer for “Olive Kitteridge,” a character who continues to turn up in Strout’s interconnected novels, including this one, in which she’s living in a nursing home and yammers on about birds. Strout’s books make the New York Times Bestseller list on a regular basis, so a lot of people read them (and fail to return the books when they borrow them from me!).

Strout’s appeal sneaks up on you. She lives in Maine and knows the landscape and the people there, but she’s attuned to the universal fluctuations of human nature and lets us enjoy them with her.