SEver since the Great Plague of the fourteenth century, wealthy city dwellers fleeing to the countryside when a pandemic breaks out have been literary characters. They wait and tell each other stories. Especially if you like to talk or even write. Like Lucy Barton. She is one of the main characters in the new novel “By the Sea” (originally “Lucy by the Sea”, 2022) by Pulitzer Prize-winning and award-winning US author Elizabeth Strout. In the United States and here, it was catapulted to one of the top bestsellers immediately after its publication. In addition to the successful writer Barton, her ex-husband, the parasitologist William Gerhardt, and both daughters Chrissy and Becka appear in it.
In the previous novel, “Oh, William,” Lucy and William found each other again after decades, she after the death of her second husband, a cellist with the New York Philharmonic, and he after two more divorces. The plot of “Am Meer” begins in 2020: “I didn’t see it coming like most people. But William is a natural scientist, he saw it coming.” And then you are in a Corona novel and succumb to the pull of Lucy Barton’s narrative voice, who is a fabulous observer of people in normal everyday life and in a state of emergency. At Williams's insistence, she drops everything in Manhattan and moves with him to a house on a ledge in Crosby, Maine, the fictional small town where almost all of Strout's characters meet sooner or later.
It's still winter here in the north. Lucy finds herself “in a strange land,” with no beaches, with roads ending in the sea, brown and gray cliffs, copper-colored seaweed and fir trees all the way down to the magnificent ocean. As the pandemic continues, her sense of time dwindles, life becomes unreal, “brain fog” waves through her head. Is it the lockdown? The age? Or the toxic state of a country in which the residents of Crosby insult New Yorkers who have arrived, George Floyd is suffocated by a police officer and the president soon orders the storming of the Capitol? Confronted with television images, with demons from her poverty-stricken childhood and her daughters' existential problems, Lucy sees catastrophes looming “full of fear”. While William finally meets his half-sister after cancer surgery and researches the effects of climate change on agriculture with new energy.
Insight into the fragility of all certainties
It is the things in life that Strout lets pass by casually, sometimes elliptically, sometimes meandering, just as they coexist, emerge and dissolve again in Lucy's perception. Cut off from comfortable habits, Lucy relies on William's expertise and the affection of her neighbor Bob Burgess, with whom she prefers to go for walks alone. Only after long months of Corona madness does she write again – but not memoirs of an “old woman who peddles her poor origins” or novels “about older women for older women”, but stories about socially left-behind men who are in the elections elect Donald Trump again in November. And Lucy's almost intrusive lack of knowledge becomes increasingly clear as a form of skepticism, as an insight into the fragility of all certainties and into very personal truths, even the false ones. When the vaccine arrives, she travels to New York City, which seems strangely alien and empty under a pristine blue sky after a year without air travel. Like before, she shops at Bloomingdale's but can't find the exit as her daughters' outrage over all the child labor stuff resonates.
Strout uses the colloquial tone of a narrator who talks incessantly to herself and to others, “they talked and talked and talked.” The shared confessions, memories and anecdotes connect couples, families, friends and acquaintances who “told and told”, always with a mask on, of course. They give the novels their nested, episodic or serial form. Since everything that happens in Crosby converges in the end, the life strands of characters from different novels also intertwine. Just as in Lucy Barton's quarantine, the gruff math teacher Olive Kitteridge, who bullied her own family in her younger years, watched over the well-being of the other residents of Crosby and now that she is looked after in the Maple Tree residence, is still seen as a good one Fairy works.
Elizabeth Strout, who lives in New York City and Maine, must have spent a lot of time empathizing with Crosby's residents and visitors, knowing their strengths and weaknesses, contradictions and secrets. Lucy Barton is there for the fourth time as the counterpart to Olive Kitteridge, who is portrayed by the strong Frances McDormand in a short series co-produced by Tom Hanks (2014, HBO). The reader can dock here or there and then watch the first image of a film with Lucy: a blue surface on which many table tennis balls roll around, every now and then one of the balls collides with another and bounces away again. “Nothing else happened, the balls just rolled around and sometimes touched each other.” Like Lucy, William, Bob and the others. Anyone who has read Elizabeth Strout once will want to continue reading. Her next novel will be released in the summer, as befits series: “Tell Me Everything”.
Elizabeth Strout: “By the Sea.” Novel. Translated from English by Sabine Roth. Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munich 2024. 288 pages, hardcover, 24 euros.
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