Elizabeth Strout's 'Lucy Barton': What we can't know about one another

My Name Is Lucy Barton

nolead begins By Elizabeth Strout

Random House. 191 pp. $26.00

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Reviewed by Kevin Grauke

nolead ends 'There was a time, and it was many years ago now, when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks." So begins Elizabeth Strout's fifth novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton. One might assume that such an opening portends a narrative preoccupied with sickness and recovery; Strout, however, has other pursuits in mind.

While we do remain in the hospital with the narrator, Lucy, for the duration of the narrative (with flashes backward and forward throughout), her reason for being there is never explained in detail, nor is it important. What is important: Her mother, from whom she had been estranged for many years, came to visit her.

Why did they go so long without seeing each other? We never get the full story; instead, Lucy reveals only bits and pieces. Her childhood was one of poverty and abuse, but neither is described in great detail - not as much as we might expect - nor are the details important. Why? Because, again, Strout has other concerns.

"There are elements that determine paths taken, and we can seldom find them or point to them accurately," notes Lucy early on, but she does her best to do just that. As a girl, seeking warmth not found at home in winter, she stayed late at school to be near the radiators. That spawned her love for books. What else was there to do but read? "Books brought me things," she says. "They made me feel things. . . . And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone!" And write she does. In fact, the text is purported to be her actual writing, not merely a story she tells for unclear reasons, which is how we tend to read first-person narratives.

As Lucy recounts her mother's five-day visit, Strout explores how everyone inevitably remains an unknowable mystery to everyone else. Lucy understands that she will never be able to comprehend fully her mother's feelings or motivations. Why is her mother so cold, so insensitive?

Strout admirably refuses to fulfill our desire for the sense of truth we so desperately seek from narratives. While Lucy struggles with the inscrutable truths of others, Strout remains true to a fiction writer's most crucial mission, as explained to Lucy by a writer she admires: "Report on the human condition. . . . Tell us who we are and what we think and what we do."

Kevin Grauke, an associate professor of English at La Salle University, is the author of "Shadows of Men," a collection of stories.