Ugh ( )

This book’s writing style did not agree with me. A quite diffident and uncertain voice with consistently annoying verbal tics. So many “What I mean is…” and “…, I mean to say.” I suppose it’s going for a humble, intimate effect and for many readers it appears to work but I wouldn’t be one of them.

It’s a low key story being told by Lucy as she goes with her ex-husband William to look for some of his familial roots in another state, and while on this journey she reflects back on her life, character, and relationships.

I am only saying: I wondered who William was. I have wondered this before. Many times I have wondered this.

Well, that’s an example of the dull prose I didn’t care for, as well as an illustration of Lucy’s uncertainty about people and her own capabilities that are woven through the story. In the end she decides that, “we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.”

It’s a little mysterious to me how this novel made the Booker longlist; I’m afraid it missed me, I mean to say. ( )

A melancholy story of learning that we really don?t know ourselves or the ones we love/loved. Kirkus:Pulitzer Prize winner Strout offers a third book linked to writer Lucy Barton, this time reflecting on her complex relationship with her first husband, before and after their divorce.While Anything Is Possible (2017) told the stories of people among whom Lucy grew up in poverty in Amgash, Illinois, this new novel returns to the direct address of My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016). Lucy?s beloved second husband, David, has recently died, and ?in my grief for him I have felt grief for William as well,? she tells us. Her stuttering, stop-and-start narrative drops this and other pronouncements and then moves on, circling back later to elucidate and elaborate. After the pain of their separation subsided, Lucy and William became friends, close enough so that when he begins having night terrors at age 69, he confides in Lucy rather than his much younger third wife. (Wife No. 2 was among the many infidelities that broke up his marriage to Lucy.) Perhaps it?s because the terrors are related to his mother, Catherine, who ?seemed central to our marriage,? Lucy tells us. ?We loved her. Oh, we loved her.? Well, sometimes; Lucy?s memories reveal a deep ambivalence. Catherine patronized her, referring frequently to the poverty of Lucy?s background and her unfamiliarity with the ways of more affluent people. So it?s a shock to Lucy as well as William when he learns that his mother was married before, abandoned a baby daughter to marry his father, and came from a family even poorer than Lucy?s. Their road trip to Maine prompts William?s habitual coping mechanism of simply checking out, being present but not really there, which is the real reason Lucy left him. Strout?s habitual themes of loneliness and the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person are ubiquitous in this deeply sad tale, which takes its title from Lucy?s head-shaking acknowledgment that her ex will never change, cannot change the remoteness at the core of his personality.Another skillful, pensive exploration of Strout?s fundamental credo: ?We are all mysteries.?

I love Elizabeth Strout's writing and the characters she brings to life. This was a short and thoughtfully written book and it will stick with me. Whether it's Lucy or Olive or William...these characters tend to hang around long after I've finished reading. ( )

In a brilliant sequel to My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible, Strout just keeps on revisiting, expanding and revealing more of her imaginative world.
This short book ruminates on the unknowability of another person, and of oneself, as life is built up of perceptions which may, or may not, be correct. It reports this through the first person reflections of Lucy following the death of her second husband, David, as she helps her first husband, William, deal with the discovery that he has an older half sister who his mother, Catherine Cole, had abandoned to be with William’s father, and had never mentioned.
I’m unsure what exactly touches me in Strout’s storytelling, the circling around the protagonist’s character with carefully meditative language, illuminating life with glimpses.

It’s odd, because on one hand I think I am invisible, but on the other I know what it is like to be marked as separate from society, only in my case no one knows it when they see me. But I thought that about that fat man. And about myself. (Page 201) ( )