[title subtitle=”review: Marla Cantrell”][/title]
My Name is Lucy Barton
By Elizabeth Strout | Random House | 193 pages |$26
What I’d like to say first is that this is a deceptively simple book, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout. Lucy Barton, a young mother of two, who lives in Manhattan in the 1980s, goes into the hospital for an appendectomy. Two days later, a fever surfaces and she can’t keep food down, so she stays for nine weeks as her doctor tries to unravel the mystery behind her illness.
Lucy’s husband moves her to a private room with a television. He has a neighbor shuttle their two daughters back and forth for visits. But he, afraid of hospitals since his own father died in one, seldom appears. To remedy his wife’s loneliness, he pays to fly her mother in, all the way from Amgash, Illinois, since she has far too little money to travel on her own.
To occupy the time, Lucy’s mother tells her stories from home of failed marriages. There’s Mississippi Mary, who came from little but who married a man whose paycheck made the world seem right. But then she discovered her husband’s affair with his secretary and had a heart attack. Lucy’s mother equates Mary to Elvis, both transcending poverty but failing to thrive in an opulent world.
Another disaster is Kathie Nicely, who had a fine home, a solid husband, beautiful daughters, and a wandering eye. When she left her family for one of the girls’ schoolteachers, her life imploded, and her lover turned her away. Mary’s mother tells her how Kathie lives alone now, not far from her ex-husband, who will never forgive.
The stories dance on the surface of things, never going too deep. They feel as if they’re being told to cover up other stories that would be too hard to hear. Lucy’s mother barely mentions Lucy’s father, for example, a man who never recovered from fighting in World War II. She comments only once on Lucy’s older brother, unemployed, who still lives at home, reads gentle books about life on the prairie during a simpler time, and sneaks out to the neighbor’s barn to sleep beside the pigs that are scheduled for slaughter the following morning.
Between the stories Lucy’s mother tells, and the stories Lucy intertwines of her childhood, a portrait of a woman hungry for love and kindness and acceptance appears. Lucy, who’s a writer, has learned not to leave the hard parts out, but even as she upends the past, filled with too little love and too little food, she seems to offer her mother redemption. She doesn’t know how much her mother remembers, she says. She doesn’t know what her mother’s own childhood was like.
And try as you might not to like her mother, there is something achingly appealing about her. You imagine her on the plane, her first flight ever. You see her scrambling for a cab in New York City, wracked with confusion about how things work in this massive city. You listen as she gossips to distract her daughter at a time when Lucy’s future seems brightly uncertain, and your heart opens up to her.
The beauty of My Name is Lucy Barton lies exactly there, in its ability to make connections with those we might otherwise never understand. And this is why this story is not a simple one. But nothing worth reading ever really is.
