Published by Random House on September 20, 2022
References to the pandemic have been sneaking into recent novels, usually adding color to the background. Lucy by the Sea is the first novel I’ve read that both makes the pandemic central to the plot and takes the viral spread of death seriously. Since the novel begins in New York, the US epicenter of the pandemic in its early days, the fear of death that the characters experience rings true. Because they rapidly scamper from New York, however, their fear is largely animated by news reports rather than firsthand experience. The pandemic is therefore central to the plot while still remaining in the background. In most respects, Lucy by the Sea is a typical New York domestic drama, complete with infidelity and family crises and a protagonist who writes novels.
Lucy Barton narrates the story from her privileged perspective. Lucy is a novelist who lives in New York. She has appeared in a couple of novels that the New York literary establishment holds in high regard, but I haven't read them so Lucy is new to me. She is an older white woman who feels insulted when her daughter’s boyfriend mentions that she only writes books about older white women. Not that it’s wrong to do so, but Lucy by the Sea is very much a novel about an older white woman.
Lucy has been a widow for more than a year. Although her age and location enhance her vulnerability to the virus, she doesn’t watch the news and is surprised when William, her first husband, insists that she accompany him to Maine until it is safe to return to the city. She tries not to be angry with her dead husband for leaving her to cope with a pandemic but seems to be grateful that a former husband came along to protect her.
Lucy is surprised that people in Maine assume New Yorkers feel superior to them. Lucy shouldn’t be surprised because she does, in fact, feel superior. Avoiding contact with people in Maine is not difficult for her because she doesn’t want to know them, apart from a man who gives her his undivided attention when they’re together.
Quarantined in Maine, Lucy starts watching the news. She congratulates herself for being angry about George Floyd. It reminds her of her “deep response” to the brutality inflicted on Abner Luima. I suppose belated wokeness is better than none, but I suspect that Lucy is more concerned about the impact of police violence on her emotions than the harm it causes to the victims. She recalls that a black writer at a conference told her about being afraid of driving alone on an empty Indiana road and says “I thought about that for a long time” without revealing what she thought. Why Lucy so frequently tells the reader that she thinks unspecified thoughts about various topics was a mystery to me.
On the other hand, when Lucy describes her thoughts, they are so uninteresing that she should have kept them to herself. When William gets excited about potato parasites (a topic within his field of scientific expertise), Lucy takes note of her own (fleeting) interest: “I thought about how when a person is really excited about something, it can be contagious.” Usually she’s thinking about how something makes her feel. Much of the novel consists of Lucy telling the reader “this made me happy” or “this made me sad” which, as plots go, isn’t much of one.
Lucy admonishes herself for being selfish (not giving up a place in a long line for an older man) and, again, seems pleased with her self-awareness, her recognition that she is selfish, while making no effort to change. She does not recognize (although the reader will) her talent for sucking the pleasure out of every moment. Standing near the water and admiring the view, she begins to fret about what might happen if she falls, so she goes inside again where she can feel safe in her isolation. Lucy enjoys talking with William but hates him when he doesn’t give her his undivided attention.
Lucy frets about growing old and the risk of dementia. She frets about losing her ex-husband the way she lost her husband. She frets about her childhood. She frets about her children. She frets about college students not respecting her work. She frets about whether people have free will. She frets about her hair. She frets about cultural divisions in the country (something she apparently failed to notice until she left New York). She is “petrified” about her lack of connection to her New York apartment. She feels “great anguish” that her adult children do not contact her as often as they did when they were younger, which makes her fret about whether she was “the mother I thought I had been.” Late in the novel, she writes “In December, I noticed a drop in my mood,” In February, she reports “I often felt sad.” Some months later, “An emptiness had come into me.” She might be the dreariest person alive.
William is also depressed — not because he is living with Lucy, although that would be a depressing experience for most men. William is lonely and Lucy provides relief, although they can’t resume their marital intimacy because William has a medical problem. That might be why he’s depressed and lonely, but Lucy is too self-absorbed to see William’s depression as anything other than reflection of her own unhappiness. Lucy’s friend Charlene appears to be lonely, which only makes Lucy frightened that she might appear to others to be lonely.
Part of the story revolves around Lucy’s family. Lucy worries that one of her daughters is demonizing her husband because (as she knows from personal experience) women sometimes do that to justify their desire to have an affair. According to William, Lucy’s mother is a “whack job,” but Lucy has unresolved feelings about her (she imagines receiving daily guidance from a nice mother). Lucy’s daughter refuses to abandon a husband who refuses to leave Brooklyn, but she’s frightened by refrigerated trucks collecting people who have died. Lucy’s sister joins a far-right church that finds masks during a pandemic to be ungodly (she trusts God to protect her) and admonishes Lucy for believing that germs can kill people. People in Lucy’s family eventually get sick with COVID; a daughter has a difficult pregnancy; her daughters’ marriages are troubled through no fault of their adoring husbands, perhaps because the daughters are emulating their mother. Lucy has some good advice for one of her daughters, although she’s largely repeating the unheeded advice she got from her psychiatrist.
Lucy by the Sea might be a good book for women who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they are in bad marriages. It might be a good book for older, sheltered women of means who live in New York. It wasn’t a good book for me but I’m probably the wrong reader for it. I’m tired of reading mundane observations like “we do the best we can.”
Elizabeth Strout won a Pulitzer and her writing style is fluid, so who am I to complain about her work? I can only say that I found the book more annoying than appealing.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS