She Treads Softly: Lucy by the Sea

Monday, September 19, 2022

Lucy by the Sea

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
9/20/22; 304 pages
Random House

Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout is a so-so pandemic novel. Basically, William whisks Lucy out of NYC to live out the pandemic lockdown in a remote home located in a coastal community in Maine.

I've been a huge fan of Lucy Barton and have enjoyed Strout's novels for years. I was looking forward to reading Lucy by the Sea, but once I started it, the novel fell so flat I also most didn't finish it. Strout gets points for her ability to write and that's it. It's a pandemic lock down novel and a lazy, scattered story lacking a keen focus. I didn't care about this fictional story which felt perfunctory and whiny. There was no great story here.

All of us experienced the lockdown (or not) in different ways and all of us have our own stories. Setting aside this novel and allowing time to temper the facts and events would have been wiser than publishing this. My fluid rule that authors need to keep their personal editorializing on social/political views on contemporary topics to themselves and out of new books as it diminishes and dates the novel, yet again, applies. This is a disappointment. I'm apparently a complete outlier among reviewers, but I can't believe all the people writing glowing reviews read the same novel I did.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Random House via NetGalley

No comments:

Post a Comment

John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.