Amy and Isabelle was published by Random House in 1998, introducing Elizabeth Strout to readers who would follow her career through the next three decades. The novel is set in Shirley Falls, a fictional Maine town that would recur in later novels, during a summer of unusual heat that serves as both setting and metaphor — everything is overheated, exposed, slightly distorted.
Isabelle Goodrow is a single mother who works at the local mill, maintains rigid respectability, and keeps her past (she was an unwed mother) hidden behind a facade of propriety. Her daughter Amy, sixteen, quiet, and starved for attention, begins an affair with her math teacher, Mr. Robertson — a relationship that is exploitative on his part and desperately needy on hers. When Isabelle discovers the affair, she responds not with the compassion Amy needs but with rage and shame: she cuts off Amy’s hair (the most visceral scene in the novel) and retreats into a silence that is more punishing than any words.
Strout’s achievement is to make both women comprehensible and sympathetic without excusing either. Isabelle’s fury is driven by her own history — she was herself seduced and abandoned, and Amy’s affair reopens wounds she has spent years concealing. Amy’s neediness is the product of growing up with a mother who cannot express love except through control. The teacher, Robertson, is the least interesting character — a familiar type, the charming predator — but Strout is not primarily interested in him. Her subject is the mother-daughter relationship, and the novel’s power comes from its unflinching depiction of the ways that love and damage are intertwined.
The small-town setting is handled with the authority of a native. Strout grew up in small Maine towns and knows the dynamics of gossip, judgment, and surveillance that govern life in places where everyone knows everyone. The mill, the church, the grocery store, the river — these are the coordinates of a world where privacy is impossible and respectability is the only shield against communal contempt.
The novel was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and established the themes — loneliness, shame, the difficulty of human connection, the particular texture of life in small New England towns — that Strout would explore with increasing mastery in her subsequent work.
Collecting Amy and Isabelle
First edition (Random House, New York, 1998): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Later editions: $5–$10