Book review: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout is about poverty, abuse and love

The book is structured as an extended flashback of the trauma survivor, Lucy Barton.

This book cover of My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout. Random House via AP

My Name is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout

(Random House)

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The narrator of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel has a peculiar voice for a twice-married, successful writer and mother of two grown daughters. She sounds like a little girl.

Indeed, readers may wonder at first whether they have inadvertently picked up a novel aimed at younger readers. Soon, though, it becomes clear that Lucy Barton is in fact a trauma survivor.

Her family was so poor they lived in a garage for her first 11 years. “Your family stinks,” children in their tiny Illinois farm town taunted her in the playground.

Her father was sexually deviant. Her mother, who might have been an abuse victim as well, tells Lucy as she grows up that she is starting to look like a neighbour’s cow.

Lucy understands she didn’t have a normal childhood – “that huge pieces of knowledge about the world were missing that can never be replaced” – yet she bristles when anyone else suggests it.

The book is structured as an extended flashback as Lucy recalls a period of her life when, as a young wife and mother, she was hospitalised for nine weeks for a mysterious ailment. Her mother comes to New York to visit her, staying in her hospital room for five days.

During that time, they gossip about friends and relatives. The mother talks only about the ruined lives and failed marriages of others, incapable of acknowledging the hurt and suffering in her own family.

When Lucy wants to discuss why she was locked in the cab of her father’s lorry with a long brown snake, her mother feigns innocence: “I don’t know anything about a lorry,” she says.

Later, Lucy writes sketches about this visit and shows them to another writer, who tells her that they’re very good but that “people will go after you for combining poverty and abuse”.

What she’s actually written, the writer tells her, is “a story about love”.

Well, yes and no. Strout, whose short story collection Olive Kitteridge won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009, and was later made into an HBO mini-series, has written a strange and affecting story about poverty and abuse – and how it’s possible for them to coexist with love.

* The Associated Press