"Lucy by the sea" by Elizabeth Strout

An audio book.

Bill and (first-person) Lucy were married 20 years, then divorced 20 years before the book's events. He's a scientist, she's a novelist. Bill's wife has left him, and Lucy's husband John died about a year before. Circumstances bring them together again. When Covid hits New York, Will decides they should escape to Maine. While there, Lucy hears about friends dying and her son-in-law Trey's unfaithfulness (Trey's a poet who Becka married on the bounce). Living under the same roof, old tensions reappear. The locals don't like New Yorkers.

Will meets his estranged half-sister Lois, who hated their mother. He tells Lucy (but hasn't told their daughters) that he had a prostate op because of cancer. He's unable to have sex.

She's becoming friendly with Bob. She finds the regularity of the tide comforting. "My whole childhood was a lockdown" she says.

Lucy and Bill start sleeping together again. She gives up her New York flat (it was where she and John had lived)

Bill and Bob make a writing studio for her - the first she's ever had. She writes a story using ingredients she's recently collected, about a white policeman who evades arrest. Her brother dies (found in his flat). It doesn't seem to affect her much. She makes an attempt to understand people unlike her - Trump supporters; her sister (who's become a fundamentalist christian). Will's unfaithfulness had hurt and humbled her. When her daughter Chrissie after her 3rd miscarriage thinks of having an affair, Lucy's against it. Chrissie changes her mind at the last moment. Becka, c.40, is accepted at Yale.

There are lots of little anecdotes and memories. Chapters sometimes end with foreshadowing. I'm surprised that a supposed novelist would think "the ocean seemed a blue colour" (rather than "the ocean seemed blue") or "and I would think to myself 'I am happy'", or "her eyes looked smaller in her face" - I just wouldn't say those phrases. And the insights/events seem unexceptional to me. I'm not tempted to read any more of her books.

Other reviews

• Alexandra Harris
• Julie Myerson (her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet. Indeed it’s a truly monumental piece of work)
• Bailey Sincox (Like the works of Alice Munro, Strout’s novels are portraits of unremarkable, profoundly human lives. Her interest is in the local and the particular)