The New York Times Book Review - Claire Messud
…powerful and melancholy…Strout articulates for her readers—albeit often circumspectly, perhaps the only way—the Gordian knot of family, binding together fear and misery, solace and love…There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to…simple joy.
From the Publisher
A quiet, sublimely merciful contemporary novel about love, yearning, and resilience in a family damaged beyond words.”—The Boston Globe
“Sensitive, deceptively simple . . . [Elizabeth] Strout captures the pull between the ruthlessness required to write without restraint and the necessity of accepting others’ flaws. It is Lucy’s gentle honesty, complex relationship with her husband, and nuanced response to her mother’s shortcomings that make this novel so subtly powerful. . . . My Name Is Lucy Barton—like all of Strout’s fiction—is more complex than it first appears, and all the more emotionally persuasive for it.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“A short novel about love, particularly the complicated love between mothers and daughters, but also simpler, more sudden bonds . . . It evokes these connections in a style so spare, so pure and so profound the book almost seems to be a kind of scripture or sutra.”—Newsday
“Spectacular . . . Smart and cagey in every way . . . A book of withholdings and a book of great openness and wisdom. . . . [Strout] is in supreme and magnificent command of this novel at all times.”—The Washington Post
“An aching, illuminating look at mother-daughter devotion.”—People
“This slim, perceptive novel packs more sentiment and pain into its unsparingly honest and forthright prose than novels two and three times as long. Strout . . . has always awed us with her ability to put into words the mysterious and unfathomable ways in which people cherish each other.”—Chicago Tribune
“Lucy Barton is . . . potent with distilled emotion. Without a hint of self-pity, Strout captures the ache of loneliness we all feel sometimes.”—Time
“There is not a scintilla of sentimentality in this exquisite novel. Instead, in its careful words and vibrating silences, My Name Is Lucy Barton offers us a rare wealth of emotion, from darkest suffering to—‘I was so happy. Oh, I was happy’—simple joy.”—Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review
“Deeply affecting.”—The Guardian
“Strout allies herself less with recent autobiographical fictions than with Ernest Hemingway, whose style remains unmatched for its capacity to convey the effects of trauma without sentimentality. . . . Reading My Name Is Lucy Barton, I was frequently put in mind of Hemingway’s famous injunction to write ‘the truest sentence that you know.’”—The Wall Street Journal
“Impressionistic and haunting . . . With Lucy Barton, [Strout] reminds us of the power of our stories—and our ability to transcend our troubled narratives.”—Miami Herald
“Writing of this quality comes from a commitment to listening, from a perfect attunement to the human condition, from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue.”—Hilary Mantel
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-10-08
From Pulitzer Prize-winning Strout (The Burgess Boys, 2013, etc.), a short, stark novel about the ways we break and maintain the bonds of family. The eponymous narrator looks back to the mid-1980s, when she goes into the hospital for an appendix removal and succumbs to a mysterious fever that keeps her there for nine weeks. The possible threat to her life brings Lucy's mother, from whom she has been estranged for years, to her bedside—but not the father whose World War II-related trauma is largely responsible for clever Lucy's fleeing her impoverished family for college and life as a writer. She marries a man from a comfortable background who can't ever quite quiet her demons; his efforts to bridge the gap created by their wildly different upbringings occupy some of the novel's saddest pages. As in Olive Kittredge (2008), Strout peels back layers of denial and self-protective brusqueness to reveal the love that Lucy's mother feels but cannot express. In fewer than 200 intense, dense pages, she considers class prejudice, the shame that poverty brings, the AIDS epidemic, and the healing powers—and the limits—of art. Most of all, this is a story of mothers and daughters: Lucy's ambivalent feelings for the mother who failed to protect her are matched by her own guilt for leaving the father of her two girls, who have never entirely forgiven her. Later sections, in which Lucy's dying mother tells her "I need you to leave" and the father who brutalized her says, "What a good girl you've always been," are almost unbearably moving, with their pained recognition that the mistakes we make are both irreparable and subject to repentance. The book does feel a bit abbreviated, but that's only because the characters and ideas are so compelling we want to hear more from the author who has limned them so sensitively. Fiction with the condensed power of poetry: Strout deepens her mastery with each new work, and her psychological acuity has never required improvement.
