This is by Elizabeth Strout, whose Olive Kitteridge I enjoyed earlier in the year.

Published in 2021, and longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, it's actually the third of the "Amgash" novels. It's preceded by My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) and Anything Is Possible (2017) in a series that takes its name from the Illinois farm town in which the eponymous Lucy grew up.

Strout never planned the books as a series. They just grew organically out of one another. There are now five: Oh William! was followed by Lucy by the Sea (2022) and Tell me Everything (2024 -- this last is the one that brings Lucy into contact with Olive Kitteridge...)

The fact that I've started with the third is an occupational hazard of buying books from charity shops... You just can't control what people discard... But here it doesn't matter. You absolutely don't have to have read the two previous books to appreciate the character of Lucy and the world she inhabits.

As Viv Groskop points out, "Strout has done something generally discouraged within contemporary literary fiction despite being common in commercial fiction: created a universe around a character over multiple books... Whenever Lucy Barton pops up, you can be sure that she is part of a bigger story. And yet you can also be equally sure that each book stands independently. The Lucy Barton novels are constructed in such a way that they can be discovered on the reader’s terms, not the writer’s. There is something refreshingly trusting about this and reminiscent of classical works of fiction. Recurring characters crop up across the works of Balzac, Zola and Nabokov, travelling across novels and short stories and inserting themselves into other narratives. Strout borrows the idea, subverts it and twists it into something completely unique."

***

The novel is written in the first person. It begins: "I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William..."


I find this a slightly odd cover, as it picks up something Lucy says about David, her second husband (not William, her first, and the subject of the book): "We became each other's home... we felt that we were perched like birds on a telephone wire in New York City"

Lucy's style is chatty and informal. She circles round ideas, breaking off sometimes, coming back to things, adding layer after layer as she goes.

We rapidly learn that David died the previous year. William, meanwhile, is now on his third (much younger) wife. (He's in his early seventies, Lucy in her early sixties.)

We also, piece by piece, learn quite a bit about Lucy herself. She comes from a background of "bleak poverty", and the violence within her family led to a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She still scares easily, and is afraid of things that are not familiar. And despite being a successful writer, she feels invisible. She lives in New York, a city that she loves and feels grateful for.

But William is our focus. He's not a bad man. But he has often come across as aloof, unavailable, invulnerable. Then, things suddenly start happening to him. He has "terrors" at night -- about his late mother, Catherine; and about the visit he made to Germany (his father, who died when William was 14, was German, and met his wife when he was a POW in Maine; he had fought on the side of the Nazis, and although he later tells William that "he did not like the things the country had done", there's an inheritance that William finds embarrassing, as it derives from his grandfather's war-profiteering). It was after that visit to Germany, and his mother's death, that he started having the affairs that eventually put paid to his marriage to Lucy.

Then, in short order, he finds out he has a half-sister in Maine whom his mother had never told him about; and sees his third wife walk out on him (because he's "unreachable"...).

William invites Lucy to go with him to Maine to find out more about the half-sister. Which might sound strange. But they're still connected, these two. They have two daughters together, with whom they both seem to be on good terms. William is the first one Lucy contacts when David becomes ill; and he turns to her in this barrage of events that has beset him. Their marriage was not easy ("at times... I loathed him"), and she feels he blames her for her bouts of depression. But at the end of the day, "William is the only person I ever felt safe with. He is the only home I ever had." (Interesting, in light of the quote above.)

So, she's confused: "I wondered who William was. I have wondered this before. Many times I have wondered this." The book, then, is Lucy's attempt to unravel him.

The first part ends with her decision to accompany him to Maine. Road trip time...


I love road trips: This one was to the Murray River, Australia, 2008

***

A lot comes out of this journey. Goaded by an inadvertent comment of Lucy's, William tells her that his university career, which he had still been pursuing, albeit perfunctorily, is now basically over. Another loss, then...

And ultimately, when they track down this half-sister, Lois, it's Lucy who has the conversation with her. Lois has had a perfectly good life, but she doesn't want to connect with her brother -- and she didn't want to connect with Catherine, her mother, when she tried (without telling her son) to make contact.

We find out a lot more about this Catherine, who turns out to be the most interesting figure in the book. She did indeed walk out on her first husband and first child. Did that account for the depression William remembers her experiencing when he was a child? Was that the reason he was sent early to nursery school where he was insecure and unhappy? Now he ends up feeling resentful of Lois. Paradoxically, he feels that it was she who took his mother from him...

Lucy has told us how debonair Catherine was. The savvy, socially confident, golf-playing Catherine... She has also indicated the contradictions in the woman. On the one hand, "We loved her. Oh, we LOVED her; she seemed central to our marriage. She was vibrant." On the other, she is quite overbearing: "Catherine is the one who took us on vacations... The first trip she took us on, we had just been married. Catherine organized everything... I always hated those trips. I hated every one of them." She buys Lucy golf clubs, which she doesn't want, and never uses. On the one hand, Catherine was "light itself"; on the other, subject to depression.

And now, in Maine -- the Maine of isolation, and American flags on telegraph poles, and junk, and surly waitresses, and shuttered businesses -- they discover her origins. Catherine, says Lois, came from "LESS than nothing... from TRASH". William and Lucy go for a drive-by. The place where Catherine grew up exemplifies utter poverty: It is a "horror movie" for William.

So, in marrying her, Lucy realizes, William was unknowingly marrying someone very similar to his mother... But she is in awe of the way her mother-in-law had transcended the class she was born into -- something Lucy feels she has never entirely pulled off. And again, that contradiction: Lucy always felt he blamed her for her depression, but he tells her that she was "just FILLED with joy".


Lucy notes the "dead trees in swamps"

***

How sympathetic are we to William? The way we are led to consider this question is done quite well, I think. We teeter -- as we do in real life -- on the cusp of sympathy and annoyance.

During their unconventional road trip, William and Lucy apologize to each other for their respective roles in wrecking their marriage. And sure, depression is hard to cope with in a partner; and Lucy admits she can be self-absorbed. But still, all those affairs, William... (Affair is the word used throughout. It sounds somehow old-fashioned, almost quaint...) When Lucy eventually has enough, and walks away from the marriage (while having an affair herself), her older daughter develops an eating disorder, and she blames herself. Should she?

May Ngo certainly has no time for Lucy's first husband: "William is indulged in his self-preoccupation and insularity, never being asked to take responsibility by the women in his life, by society at large or by the book itself. Instead, this kind of indulgence is indicative of the world that William comes from, and which Lucy now occupies -- that class of entitled, affluent people. And that’s the thing about this book, it is annoying to read -- to put it bluntly -- yet another story about a self-absorbed, rich white man... Strout spends a whole book redeeming William through Lucy’s eyes, giving space to his issues and selfishness -- when people like him already takes up so much space in the world. We have libraries full of books redeeming wealthy white men, and it could be argued our culture redeems wealthy, powerful people, particularly men ('failing upwards'), so why another one?"

But I think Strout is trying to lead us to a more compassionate -- though definitely not exculpatory -- view. Sample thoughts:

-- "People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can't say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say."
-- William: "I would like to know -- I really would like to -- when does a person actually CHOOSE anything? You tell me."


Our road trip stop at gold-mining ghost town Whroo. My diary at the time: "People didn't last long here. There were just too many obstacles, many connected to lack of water. It made me think that some undertakings just prove too hard, and for all the courage of the people trying to succeed in them, they just don't come off..."

***

Strout's wandering, seemingly artless narrative style belies great technical mastery (when you finish this slight book, and think back, you're amazed at how much you know about the characters). As Laura Miller points out: "The effect is a confiding intimacy, as if the reader were catching up with an old friend in a particularly confessional mood. At the same time it invites the reader to speculate on what isn’t being told and what the speaker doesn’t even realise she is telling you."

At times, though, I found myself annoyed by the recurring phrases used to bolster this structure, which I began to find repetitive and intrusive. Examples:

* But there is also this: ...
* -- but here is what I want to say: ...
* The point is this: ...
* So there was that as well.
* ... is what I mean. And there was this: ...
* ... is part of what I'm saying.

And the title... I confess it makes me wince. In fact, I almost didn't buy the book because of the title... Lucy uses the phrase "Oh William" -- either with or without the exclamation mark, but never with a comma (should there be a comma? I would want to put in a comma -- and this blogger obviously thinks there should be, and inserts one, but I can't find a definitive verdict...) -- anyway, the phrase comes up a number of times, with different nuances:

-- about William's too-short trousers (in exasperation)
-- about his desire to see Fort Fairfield so that he can tell half-sister Lois Bubar that he's seen the place "where she had been Miss Potato Blossom Queen" (in rueful pity for this frail hope)
-- about his realization that his mother's depression was due to her abandonment of her first child (in sympathy)

OK as a recurring motif then -- but as a title? Nope...



I was somewhat troubled by Strout's depiction of this part of Maine... Really? All so bad? No redeeming features? We're in a very different part of the US, but Strout's view feels a bit like the kind of blanket dismissal that Demon Copperhead might have objected to...

There may be layers of connection here, though, that I'm not entirely getting. What she saw of Maine, for example, was so reminiscent of her native Illinois that Lucy experiences a panic attack. This blogger wonders whether the ghostly, past-it qualities of the environment might point to the reality that "their marriage, if not their friendship, is a spectral presence, long dead, although still hovering in the room". Dunno... There's a suppressed violence about some of the depictions that doesn't really carry over in that way...

Ngo also takes issue with the way Strout portrays social mobility: "Lucy was able to move out of that world and into New York’s cultural elite, but she seems to have also left behind her ability to see. In Oh William! Strout is an outsider looking in, more interested in writing the liberal upper middle-class milieu and how they view poverty (always with kindly eyes, with some compassion, but also with horror and disgust)... That is perhaps the most troubling aspect of this novel -- its valuing of social mobility, its inadvertent reinforcement of it, and so, despite appearances, its essentially conservative outlook. It is liberalism in novel form: acknowledging the shortcomings and tensions inherent in class mobility, but ultimately never fundamentally questioning it... If I was being ungenerous, I would say Oh William! is writing about the poor for comfortable people who nevertheless are aware that there are others who live very different lives to them, and who want to feel like they are open to and interested in these others’ lives. Strout is always warm and empathetic towards her lower-class characters. But her real preoccupation is with those who have successfully moved up. She is concerned with documenting social mobility, which is to say, that she is interested in the American Dream..."

I didn't feel quite so strongly about this as Ngo obviously does, but I did wonder how Lucy -- despite her self-doubt -- had "progressed" enough to be so at home in the academic and cultural environments of New York.

***

But... But... This, at the end of the day, is a very wise book.

It closes like this:

"When I think Oh William!, don't I mean Oh Lucy! too?
"Don't I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!
"Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.
"But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.
"This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true."

I often feel like that... So I am up for following Lucy a bit further.