Oh William! - Elizabeth Strout

 

 I love Elizabeth Strout’s style. There is something almost conversational about it. You feel sometimes like you’re a friend, a confidante. The narrative flows in the same way that people’s thought processes and conversations flow. It’s quite distinctive, I feel.

Oh William! is a Lucy Barton novel. And I love the continuity and the unravelling of Lucy‘s life. And this book tells of her marriage and divorce from William. In My Name is Lucy Barton Lucy took pains to tell us that she didn’t want to talk about the marriage so we knew very little about William. But by the end of this book we know a lot about him. And we know a lot more about Lucy too.

Lucy‘s background almost always defines her and her sense of feeling invisible is emphasised in this story. But here we see her from William’s perspective too and he feels that she is a spirit, yet he also says that she’s a strange one.. The overriding sense I had was that their relationship was a very moving one yo-yoing between fondness and exasperation. The relationship as a marriage doesn’t endure yet their sense of friendship is sustained and they seem to have an enviable bond.

Under Strout’s skilful pen the depth of emotion and feeling that can be built up between two people through a sustained relationship is sensitively explored, dissected and developed - the way that two people get to know each other over the years. Although I think the novel does suggest that we can never truly know another person. There is the hint that people do have the potential to change maybe? I liked the way that William and Lucy were able to talk about the fractures in their marriage seemingly without recrimination or animosity, just stating the facts. That is easier to do after the event maybe but all too often people don’t get that chance to talk through what might have gone wrong.

What I also love about Strout’s writing is that she’s observational and nonjudgemental. Whether her characters are behaving well or badly the end result is real because they behave as people behave,  not as people “behave in books“. 

The blurb tells us that William asks Lucy to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret and it turns out to be a fascinating and intricate development in the story  but I think it’s also about a midlife crisis maybe not just for William maybe for Lucy as well? Lucy constantly asks questions but finds no answers and her recent widowhood has caused her to think about life as much as William in his desire to unearth his family secrets. I think it’s also story of grief and of loneliness. 

Another aspect of Strout’s writing I enjoy is the sense of place. The juxtaposition between the hectic New York life and the more staid New England life is well expressed here. I felt that New York for Lucy is symbolic and signifies her escape from a past that she would care not to dwell on.

But can we call the Lucy Barton novels a trilogy? There is something delightfully unconventional about them as sequels (or prequels depending upon which order you read them and I don’t think that matters in the end) and I think they are unique in contemporary fiction. Personally I hope there will be more Lucy Barton books and that knocks the trilogy theory out of the window. Good!

I love the ending of the book too. 

‘But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We’re all mysteries, is what I mean.

This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.’

Oh Lucy! Oh Elizabeth!