My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


A short book, but a powerful one, that many of you would read in one day. Even I, as the slowest of readers, could finish it in three. Don't expect the thrill of beautiful, uplifting sentences here; the language is plain. Like the Congregationalist background of the characters: Lucy Barton and her mother.


Lucy, now a writer with grown-up daughters of her own, is remembering her early years as a mother and, especially, an extended stay in a hospital room with a view of the Chrysler building in New York. Unable or unwilling to visit Lucy himself, her first husband called the mother Lucy hadn't seen since leaving home. Home - a bleak field in Illinois, on which Lucy, her sister and her brother, had spent a fearful and socially restricted childhood.

The narrative then focuses on the five days and nights of Lucy's mother's visit to her bedside. Her refusal to sleep, her cat naps, her evasive staring through the window whenever Lucy tried to move the conversation on from silly anecdotes about the neighbours or passing strangers they once knew. So the mother wants the talk to stay within the period of Lucy's life that she was part of, the time when she had the authority. While Lucy longs for her to ask her about her new life in the city, the grandchildren, Lucy's work. The mother's resentment and lack of confidence is palpable. And in the widening gulf between these conflicting needs a picture emerges, awkwardly. A relationship minutely scrutinised with a cool mid-western eye. A woman who, because of circumstance, had to starve her children of her comfort. And a girl who survives regardless and grows to become the woman she wanted to be.

More a portrayal than a story, in which the spaces behind the words count for much more than the words themselves. Spaces that, in the end, reveal a somewhat awkward and rough beauty.



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