There will be many readers who feel that it's simply too soon for a pandemic novel, and this writer admits to being one of them.
The scramble to capture the Covid-19 outbreak in literature – as well as music, art, film and every other creative medium – began barely a few months into it. Just as Boccaccio did in the 14th century with The Decameron, and Daniel Defoe did with A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722, 57 years after London’s most recent plague, artists devoted themselves to telling us the story of what we saw unfolding minute by minute, night after night, on televisions, phones and hospital wards.
Almost three – three! – years later, we finally have a Covid novel that might make it worth revisiting those long lockdown months again.
It’s undoubtedly to her credit that Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel Lucy by the Sea makes our recent shared past feel present – in all its unnerving and unparalleled horror - once again.
We meet Lucy, a writer living in New York City and a recurring narrator in a number of Strout’s novels, just as the pandemic sends countries into lockdown. Grieving the death of her second husband, David, Lucy is whisked away from the heaving city to a rented house on the Maine coastline by William, her first husband and father of her two children, a scientist keenly aware of the gravity of the pandemic.
Lucy, meanwhile, is by turns oblivious to it or in denial, and considers William to be an "alarmist". She recalls telling her doctor, "see you at the end of the year", a fleeting moment of innocence about the seismic changes coming her way. She’s shocked when Broadway closes its theatres, and plagued by memories of her life in New York, like the older woman who would sit on the curb when it got too hot. "Where was she now?" she wonders. "Was she still alive?"
Strout is adept at this kind of foreshadowing, dropping knowing winks to the reader that she’s in on it, even while Lucy stumbles through the quagmire we all had to endure. Its effect is a haunted and wistful feeling that weaves through the novel.
Her exile is further punctuated by the familiar soul-searching that comes with isolation. Here Strout mines the depths of her characters and finds truly subtle facets of humanity. When Becka, Lucy’s daughter, tells her that Bloomingdale’s might close in the city, she opines about the "gross" materialism of the store and the child labour that’s used to create the items it sells.
Lucy is galled by this revelation, stunned by how she took such luxury for granted: "Sauntering through the shoe section like that was all we had to do in the world." Her stunned shock comes across as a subtle pillorying of the wealthy who suddenly woke up to a world that wasn’t all consumerism and equality – no matter how many celebrities singing 'Imagine’ try to convince you.
Early in the novel, Lucy recalls a trip to Grand Cayman with William. She writes, "there was a politeness to us that was consistent", a statement that feels applicable to the novel as a whole. Strout’s mastery of her characters comes through most in the placidity and steadiness of her prose, as scenes unfurl with a restraint that contrasts the often overwhelming plot.
Each chapter is like a well-appointed room, laboriously outfitted with just enough embellishment. Lucy says at one point that there was a "feeling of mutedness", which permeates the novel too.
The setting, of course, only adds to this. The sparse Maine coastline, with harsh winds and overcast days continuing into April, is a fittingly claustrophobic setting. With its lack of sentimentality and rigid tone, the novel feels contracted and almost sterile, like it’s been doused in briny salt water.
As with the real life pandemic, human connections prove to be the most interesting part of the novel, augmented by the constrains of lockdowns, quarantining and the brush of a hand on a shoulder during a socially distanced walk. Lucy recalls a trip "exploring" with William during a bout of good weather, noting "there was a sense of the physical world opening its hand to us", an example of the kind of turns of phrase that could knock you over with their tenderness.
William revels in salvaging a once-lost family connection, while Lucy grows ever closer to a neighbour who walks with her. Lucy’s daughter’s in-laws are revealed to be Covid deniers, while Lucy herself has brushes with "supporters of the current President", as she euphemistically calls them. We follow along as ties are severed and held most closely than before, as happened to many of us over the last two years.
In this sense, Strout’s novel is less exhausting than you might assume for a pandemic novel, considering many parts of the world are still coping with the ongoing horror of it. We’re still sifting through the mess we were plunged into, so it’s understandable that so potent a reminder might be too much.
Still, thanks to her delicate prose and her sensitive understanding of what the pandemic taught us, it might be worth reading, if only for a refresher on what we now endeavour to hold more dear.
