A Quiet Novel Turned into a Forceful Performance

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From The New York Review of Books:

“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.” Re-reading Elizabeth Strout’s breathtakingly exquisite novel My Name is Lucy Barton in preparation for seeing the theatrical adaptation—directed by Richard Eyre and starring Laura Linney in her British stage debut at London’s new Bridge Theatre—I found myself knocked sideways by these lines. Strout’s titular protagonist-narrator is a writer whose existence has been defined by a loneliness so acute it can only really be understood as a chronic disability. Fitting, then, that the narrative Lucy tells as she looks back on her life pivots on a period of serious illness. “There was a time, and it was many years ago now,” she begins her story, “when I had to stay in a hospital for almost nine weeks.” This was in Manhattan in the 1980s, due to complications following what should have been a routine appendectomy. At the heart of the experience is the five days Lucy’s all but estranged mother spent sitting vigil by her daughter’s bedside.

My Name is Lucy Barton is a story about the harrowing legacy of poverty and abuse. Despite having left the world of her childhood behind—she escaped her impoverished life in the small rural town of Amgash, Illinois where she was born and raised, first to college, and thereafter to New York City, where she married and had children, going on to become a writer—as Lucy’s story unfurls, we learn that the punishing ostracization she endured as a child was the defining experience of her life. Hers was a childhood spent “friendless” and “scorned,” her family looked down upon because they were so poor and often so strange.

. . . .

A row of brownstones shimmers into focus when she speaks about the apartment that she shared with her husband and their two small daughters. Gently undulating rows of corn, as far as the eye can see, or a lone tree on an otherwise deserted prairie emerge when she reminisces about Amgash, along with the dark, dirt-streaked interior of the truck her parents used to lock her inside. Most memorable, though, is the play’s opening image of the window in the hospital room, through which we see a rendering of the Manhattan skyline, the Chrysler Building looming large—evocative of one of Edward Hopper’s famous cityscapes, “the signature images of isolation in the city,” as the writer Olivia Laing described the artist’s now iconic scenes.

. . . .

It’s revealing that one of the earliest connections Laing makes in her book is between loneliness and illness. “Like depression, like melancholy or restlessness,” she explains, loneliness “is subject too to pathologisation, to being considered a disease.” Lucy’s condition remains enigmatic. “No one could isolate any bacteria or figure out what had gone wrong,” she explains towards the beginning of her story. She runs fevers, internal blockages are suspected, she has no appetite, can’t keep food down, and thus loses a concerning amount of weight. Yet the tests come back negative, the scans are inconclusive. Undiagnosed, she’s a medical mystery.

Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books