Elizabeth Strout Has a New Novel

 Another writer prison gave me a chance to read was Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible. I liked how she wrote about small town Illinois. It sounded authentic and without any condescension. She has a new novel, OH WILLIAM!, and Lithub has an excerpt here. The New York Times has a review here and from reading that, it looks like Lucy Barton has returned.

How a literary conscious uncoupling and Laura Linney helped Elizabeth Strout write Oh, William! from Entertainment Weekly confirms my opinion.

In the book the exes are still friendly — consciously uncoupled, as it were — with William relying on Lucy for moral support as the consequences of his past affairs, and newly surfaced family tragedies, begin to weigh on him. The feeling that Lucy has actually dodged heartache through her divorce is palpable, even as she works through her own grief after the death of her beloved second husband, David.

A common interpretation of My Name Is Lucy Barton is to see it as a mother-daughter story (in William's absence, Lucy's long-estranged mom keeps vigil at the hospital). But Strout, 65, says her intention was actually to explore poverty — something she chose to expand on in Oh William!

"We see more of Lucy's sad beginnings, and how she crossed class lines to be with William," she says. "That element of deprivation, and how people manage to move beyond it, is really interesting to me."

I made notes on the other Strout books and I hope I can find them. I will have to see if I can get a library card for the Muncie library, I suspect they will have this new book.

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