Beth Bonini's Reviews > Lucy by the Sea

Like many others, I did not see it coming.

But William is a scientist, and he saw it coming; he saw it sooner than I did, is what I mean.

This book, which follows on closely (both in novel-time and publishing-time) from Oh, William!, begins in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic became - not just a news item from China - but a tsunami that was going to engulf most of the world. It was a strange experience to read this timeline of trauma; it felt both recent, and strangely distant. Coincidentally, I got my fourth vaccine booster the day that I began reading this book, although most people I know seem to think we are now in “post-COVID” time. What does that mean? Perhaps only that we do not fear the disease in the same way, despite the fact that we are just now beginning to properly deal with the financial and emotional fallout.

I suspect that most people who reach for this book are already devoted Lucy Barton - and Elizabeth Strout - fans. When Lucy realises that her entire childhood had been a lockdown - a parallel universe of loneliness, isolation, deprivation and fear - it’s entirely obvious why Strout made the decision to analyse the pandemic through this character’s particular lens.

The plot is admittedly a tick-box of every typical COVID experience, but Strout makes it work. It works because she is the most compassionate of writers. Lucy’s voice - her characteristic way of explaining things to herself, of musing, of connecting the past to the present, of exclaiming (!!) - might cloy under a lesser writer’s control, but Strout manages to make her a supremely loveable person. I use the word “person” deliberately because Lucy doesn’t feel like a character; she feels like a person to me. A dear, dear person.

The storyline takes place mostly in rural Maine, but also in New York City. That contrast is important, and it plays a key role in the plot in a variety of ways. Strout is telling Lucy’s story, but she is also telling the story of the US in the extremely tense and traumatic years of 2020-22. Like the author, Lucy is a writer and she explains her attraction to that profession as a profound curiosity and need to understand other people. If Strout has a project in this book it is exactly that: she wants to get at the combative and entirely opposed points of view that are battling it out in the US right now. If I had to pick one word to describe this book it would be humane. Lucy is like a bridge between the American people who are struggling for a toehold in the American Dream, and those who have reaped the rewards of American opportunity and prosperity.

I have to rate this book a 5; perhaps it will not be an enduring classic, perhaps it doesn’t rank amongst the great works, but Strout is peerless when it comes to creating living characters. I was stunned into quiet reflection after racing my way through Lucy’s experience of the pandemic.