Elizabeth Strout, _My Name Is Lucy Barton_

THE BOOK CLUB selection for October...I'm not sure why we never read Olive Kittredge, seeing as it is exactly the sort of thing we typically read, but somehow we did not, so this is my first Strout.

Lucy Barton, the narrator, is a writer recalling a lengthy hospitalization in the early 1980s, when she was living in New York City, married with two elementary school age daughters, and not yet established as a writer. Her mother comes out from the small Illinois town where Lucy grew up to keep her company in the hospital.

The mother's visit is the core of the book. One reads expecting some big reveal or outpouring to occur in the conversations between mother and daughter, but nothing quite so dramatic happens. The mother has some inhibition about saying "I love you," and the daughter is not much more forthcoming, so the anticipated opening up or revelation never occurs.

We do find out that  Lucy's childhood was grim, marked by the humiliations of poverty and the deeply disturbing behavior of her father, a traumatized WW II veteran. Her present is somewhat under a shadow, too, as we find out her marriage ends in about ten years time and there are strains in her relationships with her daughters. Her reasons for devoting a book to her mother's extended visit never become explicit, though.

Our (that is, the book club's) best guess arises from a weird little metafictional wormhole. Lucy accidentally meets, then attends a panel featuring, and finally participates in a workshop led by Sarah Payne, a writer Lucy admires but whom "New York just doesn't like." The encounters with Sarah Payne get Lucy writing seriously; the manuscript she brings to the workshop, and about which Payne offers crucial advice, is an early version of My Name Is Lucy Barton.  Something about the conjunction of the mother's visit with the encounters with the female artistic mentor turns Lucy from aspiring writer into writer.

The nature of that something is elusive...to tell the truth, I did not much enjoy My Name Is Lucy Barton. But most of the club did.