Elizabeth Strout’s story inOh William! unfolds with a brutal delicacy.Credit:Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images
Lucy Barton is Strout’s other recurrent female character of mature years and bears some similarities to Olive Kitteridge. Like Olive,she has lost two husbands. Like Olive,her pain runs in deep veins right back to her childhood. But Lucy Barton’s heart is closer to the surface,her language more tender,her opinions and reactions more malleable. Olive and Lucy are yin and yang,water and stone. Lucy often says things like “then there was this”. Olive is seldom so outwardly tentative. But like Olive,Lucy is made from missing parts.
Oh William!,the third Lucy Barton book,is centred on Lucy’s first husband,a scientist,with whom she had two daughters. We met William on the sidelines ofMy Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) when Lucy wakes in a New York hospital to find her mother,whom she has not seen for many years,sitting at the foot of the bed. Like Marilynne Robinson,Strout elaborately embroiders a small but complete world.
William has arranged this reunion,despite being made totally unwelcome in the Barton household,a shack on the fringe of a small town in rural Illinois. Lucy’s father returned from the Second World War with debilitating PTSD. She grew up without any experience of nurture until a kindly teacher paved the way for her to go to college,parachuting her into another world.
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Oh William! deals with a later time,following the death of Lucy’s second husband,David. William Gerhardt is now onto his third wife. During his marriage to Lucy,he had numerous affairs,including with a character from Strout’s bookThe Burgess Boys (2013). Now Lucy starts thinking that William was the only person with whom she ever felt safe. “He is the only home I ever had.” It seems possible for a time that they might come back together,fragments trying to make themselves whole by pasting themselves onto another. It turns out that William wants Lucy’s help more than he wants her.
William’s mother,Catherine,came from circumstances in rural Maine almost as tough as Lucy’s. She left her first husband for William’s father,a man who had fought on the other side of the war to Lucy’s own dad. He made money in the war in circumstances that are never explained but cast a shadow.