4.5 Stars
This book once again reunites Lucy and her philandering ex-husband and long-time friend William. He convinces Lucy to leave Manhattan and move to a small town in coastal Maine as New York City goes into lockdown because of COVID-19. The novel focuses on Lucy’s thoughts and feelings as she adjusts to life during a pandemic. Though isolated from the rest of her family, she maintains contact with them and tries to help them through their own struggles and crises.
Because of its conversational tone and rambling narrative, reading the book is like meeting with a friend and listening as she chats away, jumping from topic to topic: “Before I tell you about . . . let me say that . . .” Since I have encountered Lucy in previous books, I felt like I were revisiting with an old friend.
Lucy captures perfectly life during the pandemic. Initially there is a sense of disbelief. Then as the nature of the pandemic is understood, various emotions emerge: loneliness, sadness, uncertainty, anxiety, and grief: “The sadness that rose and fell in me was like the tides.” Readers will certainly be able to relate to Lucy’s feelings. I loved her description of feeling “as though each day was like a huge stretch of ice I had to walk over . . . and I had to make it through each day without knowing when it would stop, and it seemed it would not stop, and so I felt a great uneasiness.” I even found myself chuckling at the small annoyances that plague us when we’re in forced isolation with another person: Lucy hates William’s slurping when he eats, and he hates to see her floss her teeth. She describes episodes of brain fog, “Covid mind” William calls it. For many people, the various traumas of the pandemic served to amplify traumas of the past, and Lucy relives childhood traumas and the death of her second husband. She also finds herself in situations that teach her about herself; for instance, her failure to act in one situation has her admitting, “And I learned something that day. About myself and people, and their self-interest.”
Despite her own weariness and sadness, Lucy does realize that things could be worse: “I thought of all the people – old people and young people – who had lived out the pandemic in rooms . . . Alone.” She does manage to find comfort in new friendships and in the beauty that surrounds her: “What a thing the physical world is!” Perhaps Lucy’s friend expresses best a way to live: “’It’s our duty to bear the burden . . . with as much grace as we can.’”
What I really appreciated is Lucy’s trying to understand people who are not like her and hold opposite views. She mentions that a problem is that “Everyone thinks like themselves” so she makes a point of considering things from others’ points of view. She and William discuss Trump supporters. William says, “’They’re angry. Their lives have been hard.’” And Lucy makes friends with one of them and concludes, “And what if I had continued to feel that my entire life, what if all the jobs I had taken in my life were not enough to really make a living, what if I felt looked down upon all the time by the wealthier people in this country . . . I saw what these people were feeling; they were like my sister Vicky, and I understood them. They had been made to feel poorly about themselves, they were looked at with disdain, and they could no longer stand it.” She even writes a story that “is sympathetic toward a white cop who liked the old president and who does an act of violence and gets away with it” and she admits about her protagonist, “I loved him.” It seems that Lucy tries to love everyone though she struggles with loving herself.
Lucy knows that people are different: “We are born with a certain nature, I think. And then the world takes its swings at us” and “some people are luckier than others.” But everyone suffers and experiences sadness, pain, and fear: “money makes no difference in these kinds of things.” She realizes she may have more in common with people than she wants to admit: for instance, she draws away from people like Charlene and her sister Vicky who have “a faint odor of loneliness . . . because I had always been afraid of giving off that odor myself.” She repeats that “Everyone needs to feel important.” She also realizes that though “We are alone in these things that we suffer,” everyone is “only doing what we can to get through.” In essence, “We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all. But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through.”
I loved the many characteristics of Strout’s style: a truly introspective protagonist, the references to characters from other books, and the short sentences which reveal a complex understanding of relationships and the human condition. Readers should be warned, however, that this may be a painful read since it serves as a reminder of pandemic experiences. Some people may prefer more distance from a not-yet-over pandemic. I myself would take any opportunity to live in Lucy’s head for a while.
Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.
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