Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2022 January 07 • Friday

Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton is a member of a small but adored (by me) group of books: thrillers in which nothing happens.

Other distinguished members of this group include Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine and much of Harvey Pekar's American Splendor.

My Name Is Lucy Barton might not actually have a plot, if you agree that the difference between a story and a plot is that a story tells what happened and a plot tells why it happened.

The story of My Name Is Lucy Barton mostly takes place, at least physically, in a New York City hospital room with a view of the Chrysler Building outside its window.

As Lucy Barton remains in the hospitla several weeks longer than expected after a routine appendectomy is followed by a mysterious fever whose cause is never ascertained, her mother appears to stay with her and the two talk and Lucy, our narrator, thinks and remembers and addresses the reader directly about what is said, thought and remembered, presenting us with this book which has been kind of stealthily almost annotated.

Everything is a mystery and, possibly, a metaphor, but not in some kind of obvious or lazy post-modern or post-post-modern or any kind of writing school sort of way.

From this very specific point on the space-time map of Lucy Barton's life, this hospital bed, we zoom out to look in on different points in that map, different times and places and the smooth assurance of these journeys generate startling energies.

There isn't a false or even tentative step to be found here, even as Lucy Barton might flat out tell us that what she just said happened might not have happened or as she herself might show herself to be tentative.

This is the only book by Strout I've read but it suggests that she is a major writer with a major style. If you enjoy the power of understatement and the elegance of an economy of words, then you should be delighted by this book.

The first line is "There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks".