Lucy isn’t Strout, but Lucy’s (fictional) memoirs are Strout’s (real-life) novels: My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), Oh William! (2021), and Lucy by the Sea (2022). And as serious novelists go, Strout is a “famous writer”: Olive Kitteridge (2008) won the Pulitzer, and an HBO limited series adaptation swept the Emmys; My Name Is Lucy Barton became a one-woman Broadway play; both Olive, Again (2019) and Tell Me Everything are selections of Oprah’s Book Club.
And yet her recent novels, including the latest, are not as adept at treading that line. Tell Me Everything revolves mostly around Olive and Lucy, who sit and swap stories, and Bob and Lucy, who walk and do the same (they started strolling together during the pandemic), but there are several subplots. In one of them, Bob’s brother, Jim, is catapulted by a son’s accident into “another world, a world where all he felt was love and sorrow, and yet the love was stronger than the sorrow.” Strout describes this period in elated, somewhat soppy terms:
Jim feels this way for two weeks, which seems about right. Strout’s omniscient narrator spends the entire novel in this state, overwhelmed by fellow feeling and often sounding indistinguishable from Lucy Barton herself. Lucy, in a one-sentence paragraph from Strout’s previous novel: “Everyone needs to feel important.” The narrator in Tell Me Everything, another stand-alone sentence: “And who—who who who in this whole entire world—does not want to be heard?” If Strout was once a master at portraying quiet lives in a big way, letting them unfold and trusting readers to draw their own conclusions, she now relies on easy plays for emotional connection and tidy resolution.
“It was innocent,” Strout writes, “because both Bob and Lucy were—in a strange, indefinable way—innocent people.” Many who are in love with an unavailable person may think themselves innocent, but Bob and Lucy actually are, and not at all indefinably. They do not sneak around. They do not even confess their feelings to each other. Jim Burgess counsels his brother to control himself: “You can live with being in love with her, hard as it is, but you will not be able to live with yourself if you touch her. You’re Bob Burgess. I know you.” It’s been said that Strout is for the most part kind to her men, but one thing that separates them from so many contemporary male protagonists is that they are quietly tough on themselves. Delivering groceries to a housebound woman, Bob is asked to stay for a few minutes. “Time had not moved so slowly since geometry class in high school,” he thinks, but he stays for an hour. At his most tortured over his entirely chaste relationship with Lucy, Bob decides to reward himself with a donut if he goes an hour without thinking about her: “He did not eat very many donuts.”
The problem with Tell Me Everything is that everyone is innocent, or at least absolved.Strout plays it safe with others too. An unkempt, friendless man in his late fifties who lives with his mother, no longer works, doesn’t date, and is thought a pervert because he paints pregnant women in the nude turns out to be not only surpassingly gentle and decent but an artist of brilliance—self-taught, to boot. “Jesus,” Bob Burgess says when he sees the paintings, which he thinks “should be in a gallery in New York.” Plausible, yet this good man would be no less interesting if he were an only mediocre painter. All of Strout’s novels remind us that appearances deceive, but while the early ones uncover lives much harder than strangers might assume, the later ones insist that, almost without exception, human beings are nobler than even their intimates realize.
All of Strout’s novels remind us that appearances deceive, but the later ones insist that, almost without exception, human beings are nobler than even their intimates realize.Since then, though, Strout has seemed to abide by a fairness doctrine. Olive reviles Trump, but the Trump supporters she gets to know are invariably the salt of the earth; a nurse’s aide’s life makes her own, she realizes, look “remarkably easy.” Lucy By the Sea gives us a scene in which the title character, humiliated by a visit to a college class in which the students sneer at both her and her work, suddenly sympathizes with the January 6 insurrectionists: “What if all the jobs I had taken in my life were not enough to really make a living.… They had been made to feel poorly about themselves, they were looked at with disdain, and they could no longer stand it.” Lest anyone with Strout’s own views recoil from this rather selective portrayal, it is replaced in the next paragraph with another: “And then I thought, No, those were Nazis and racists at the Capitol. And so my understanding—my imagining of the breaking of the windows—stopped there.” With the tact of the consummate host, Tell Me Everything steers clear of political gibes. Gone is all talk of “that horrible orange-haired man,” and a conservative named Charlene Bibber is now someone whose views are merely “very different from most people in this mostly liberal town.”
If Strout were to repeat her stand-up comedy class today, I wonder if she would dare to poke fun at anyone but herself? Would she worry that she’d been mocking her own characters, her own readers—punching down—if the audience laughed? More important, I wonder what she’d write next.
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