The smart ass in me nearly dismissed this novel of intense self reflection--the quality kind that only comes with age--as "scenes from a former marriage." After all, what's left to say after "intimacy became a ghastly thing" when it comes to an ex-husband, even one who gave you what you thought you wanted more than anything else but didn't know how to get, a home, a safe harbor from a horrible past.
But then, just as she did in her previous Lucy Barton novel, Elizabeth Strout's digressive circling back, which enables the comparison of two very different marriages, once again proves William Faulkner's adage, "the past is never dead, it's not even over." William invites Lucy to accompany him to Maine for an investigation of his mother's past after he discovers she abandoned her first child to pursue a German POW, a former Nazi and his own father. Their hopeful daughters catch a whiff of reconciliation when in fact it's an exhumation that finally allows Lucy to put her fantasy of home to rest and recognize that we all are imposters, at least up to a point.
As a child, Lucy was isolated from pop culture even longer than I was while living in France and Germany with my parents without a television set for three years. What she identifies as a "cultural blank spot" initially made it almost impossible for her to connect with people, a feeling I recall from early days in the Pines when conversation inevitably devolved into favorite episodes of situation comedies I never had seen.
But it's Strout's exquisite descriptions of loneliness that resonated most powerfully for me and help me take what she has to say about Lucy's career, surely a proxy for her own, at face value:
I would give it all up, all the success I have had as a writer, all of it I would give up--in a heartbeat I would give up--for a family that was together and children who knew they were dearly loved by both their parents and who had stayed together and who loved each other too.
It would be easy to cry "bullshit" if I hadn't experienced this feeling myself, if only once a year at Christmas with Tom and Audrey, after Magda and Zoltan were born. As much as I enjoyed getting back to my own selfish life after a night with my chosen family, loneliness hit me like a ton of bricks every time. "It's something you'll never have, Jeff. Get over it." Fortunately, immediately going to a movie with Barnet did help me get over it.
Strout also offers more advice from the only person who ever taught her anything about writing, from whom she learned that each of us really has only one story to tell and we tell it over and over again:
Stay out of debt and don't have children.
Perhaps that's why I'm compelled to write.
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