Straightforward goes down so easy and feels so refreshing.Īll of which makes reading “Oh William!” like coming home to a sensibility that is so smartly deployed it might go unnoticed. Other novelists must berate themselves when they see what Strout pulls off without any tacky pyrotechnics. Strout doesn’t dress language up in a tuxedo when a wool sweater will suffice. Her exclamation points (there are many) are the little stabs of intensity our emotions cycle through each day. Where a simple phrase will do, it does: “I was so happy.” “ Oh he is just so lonely!” “What a strange thing life is.” Lucy Barton in particular, the narrator - again - of Strout’s new novel, “Oh William!,” announces her reactions with the vocabulary of, well, a regular person. Even in her novels’ darkest moments, there’s a soft, periwinkle feeling. There is a quietude to her prose - even with scowly, persnickety characters like Olive Kitteridge - that exudes calm devotion. I imagine Elizabeth Strout scrawling out her novels longhand in some serene room in coastal Maine, a party of white pines standing tall outside her window.

I highly recommend it for fans of Alice Munro or Marilynne Robinson.If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. This is not a book for everyone, but I loved it, a lot, and have picked it up several times since finishing it to reread certain passages. There are several moments in My Name is Lucy Barton where something is mentioned early on, left to hover in your mind, and then circled back to later in a devastating way. She weaves bleakness into the novel carefully, steering you gently into the saddest of places. Instead, it captures the essence of a character, and the story of her life is laid out within the book’s pages. And we did not have a television and we did not have newspapers or magazines or books in the house.’ This description of the plot might sound to some readers terribly dull or slow-moving, but the novel is neither. Protagonist Lucy Barton is reflecting on her life specifically, on a period in the 1980s when she was in hospital for nine weeks and her mother came to visit, bringing with her stories and memories from Lucy’s troubled childhood: ‘We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois … we did not have any neighbors nearby. It’s also deceiving on the surface, it’s a very quiet book, a character study without a clear plot.

My Name is Lucy Barton is a short gut-punch of a novel. Now I’ve read Strout’s new novel, My Name is Lucy Barton, and I can confidently say I think it will be one of the best books I read this year. It was one of the best books I read in 2015. Last year, I read Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and I was blown away.

Lucy barton series