It’s early March and Lucy Barton’s ex-husband, William – she’s still fond of him but they have lived apart for as long as they were married – calls to say he wants to get her out of New York. They’ll go to a friend’s empty beach house in Maine “just for a few weeks”, he assures her. He urges her to cancel all her appointments and bring her computer. “Everyone is going to be working from home soon,” he says, not least their two adult daughters – and he admits he’s “begged” them to leave the city as well.
Meanwhile, a friend of his has just died on a ventilator and there won’t be a funeral – because, William tells Lucy, we’re in “a mess”. As they leave, she’s perplexed to see surgical masks and rubber gloves on the backseat of the car. And still more nonplussed when the friend who’s lending them the Maine house won’t come out to greet them because, as William explains, coming from New York, “in his mind we’re toxic”. Still, at this point, Lucy tells us, she was “not all that concerned”.
The disarming situation described at the opening of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel might seem fantastical, the stuff of a million post-apocalyptic movies, were it not for the fact that every single one of us has recently lived through it. And lockdown especially. Strout isn’t the first writer to go there, but she certainly makes magnificent and thrilling use of it in this, her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet. Indeed it’s a truly monumental piece of work – one that you can’t help feeling deserves a less mischievously banal title (can you imagine a male writer calling a book Lucy By the Sea?).
Of course, a large part of the fascination lies in the fact that this isn’t just Lucy’s recent past but our own too. As William drives her off to Maine, we are immediately returned to the drama of those early dark unvaccinated days when frightened people, happily or not, were confined at close quarters for an unknown quantity of time. For a writer who excels at enclosed, benumbed spaces (think of the hospital room in the first Lucy novel), as well as all the quirks and uncertainties of intimacy, the whole concept is a gift.
And, all right, most people did not have an empty beach house in which to hide during the pandemic, but Strout knows that: this is an acutely socially aware novel with a wide political sweep. The haves and have-nots of Covid, Black Lives Matter, the storming of the Capitol – “there was deep, deep unrest in the country” – we watch it all unfold through Lucy’s disconcerted eyes. Even the way in which lockdown slowly unpicked our need for the material world, replacing it with a new and startling joy in the natural one: “there was a sense of the physical world opening its hand to us ... and it was beautiful”.
Sure, Lucy’s apparent determination to remain in the dark about things does occasionally strike you as unlikely – would she really not have known what the gloves and masks were for? But Strout’s ability to drench each page in equivocality, in a kind of awe – expertly honed now through four Lucy novels, including Oh William! shortlisted for this year’s Booker – perfectly evokes the childlike disconnect with which Lucy takes on (and takes in) the world. Put simply, you believe it. She has come, as we are reminded again and again (and perhaps just occasionally too often), from an emotionally and materially impoverished background, a “very very sad family”. True, she’s now a successful writer – a big enough name to do book tours and TV appearances – but the barely named terrors of her upbringing have left her fatally unnerved by the world and its workings.
Meanwhile, lockdown life “by the sea” falls into its rhythm. The pair bicker over jigsaws, take walks – William rising early to get in his “first five thousand steps”. They shop (washing their clothes straight after), cook, get on each other’s nerves – “he wanted a lot of praise for every meal he made – I noticed that” – and become “addicted” to the TV news. “Every day another state had more cases, but I still did not understand what was ahead,” says Lucy as New York explodes “with a ghastliness I seemed almost not able to take in”. She is appalled when William, a scientist, admits to her that he thinks the situation could possibly go on for “a year”.
Strout is, of course, at her best on the emotional – and familial – fallout of lockdown. Meeting up for the first time in many months, masked and socially distanced, there are tears from Lucy’s daughters when they realise they “can’t even do a family hug”. A friend comes to visit, sitting far away on a garden chair. A depressingly macho, golf-playing relative has to be frightened into quarantining. A later surprise visit from the girls is so cheering that it seems to leave “an afterglow” – an observation that touches you to the core because isn’t that something that we all experienced? In fact, Lucy’s relationship with her daughters – the resentments, the distance, the simple, hot fact of their love for one another – is rendered here with a naked honesty that is frequently heartbreaking.
And Strout is similarly astute on the eternal compromises of love, marriage and ex-marriage. Finding herself in such sudden and perpetual close proximity with the man who was once her husband, Lucy sometimes finds she cannot stand him. William isn’t as emotionally available as the male neighbour she takes walks with, William doesn’t like watching her floss her teeth, and, she now recalls, William “does not like to hear anything negative”. But he is, she admits, often able to get through to their daughters in ways she cannot.
Most of all – because it’s no spoiler to say that this is a love story – he is simply incapable of being anything but generous to her, even if it’s a generosity that Lucy finds herself unable to accept without “a shiver of foreboding”. He admits: “Yours is the life I wanted to save,” when explaining why he took her out of New York. “We all live with people – and places – and things – that we have given great weight to,” Lucy thinks. “But we are all weightless, in the end.” Maybe so, but I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel that better explains why that, probably, is enough.
•Nonfiction by Julie Myerson is published by Corsair (£14.99)
• Lucy By the Sea by Elizabeth Strout is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
