Elizabeth Strout’s novels, as she moves through her 60s, are more and more about how little we can know of another life, one another, even ourselves. All we can do is throw our arms around what baffles us.
So it’s hardly surprising that, just one year after publishing her third novel about Lucy Barton—its very title, Oh William!, a wonderfully confounding mix of pity and exasperation and love—she’s bringing out an extended postscript: a novel about how Lucy’s ex-husband William, a parasitologist who sees what’s coming, whisks her out of New York City at the first sign of the pandemic, to a cold, lonely house on a cliff in Maine. What follows is an account of the never-ending season of the virus, intimate and immediate as a diary, in which we’re reminded, every hour, that we can’t predict a thing.
