Lucy by the Sea was published by Random House in 2022, and it is perhaps the best pandemic novel yet written — not because it describes the pandemic with documentary thoroughness but because it uses the pandemic as a lens for the themes that have always concerned Strout: loneliness, connection, the difficulty of understanding other people, and the persistence of love in its most imperfect forms.
In March 2020, William insists that Lucy leave her New York apartment and come with him to a rented house on the Maine coast. They are two divorced people sharing a house in isolation — not quite together, not quite apart, thrown back on each other’s company by circumstances neither could have predicted. Lucy, who has spent her life observing other people, turns her attention inward: to her anxiety, her grief for her second husband David (recently dead), her worry about her daughters in New York, and her complicated feelings about William, who is both the safest person in her life and a man she could never live with again.
The novel tracks the months from March through the summer and fall of 2020, incorporating the events that shaped that period — the lockdowns, the George Floyd protests, the presidential election — but always filtered through Lucy’s consciousness. Strout resists the temptation to make the pandemic a subject in itself; instead, it is the condition under which her characters must live, a constraint that strips away the social apparatus of normal life and forces them to confront what remains.
What remains, for Lucy, is memory: of her childhood poverty in Amgash, of her marriages, of the people she has loved and failed. The novel’s most powerful passages are the digressions — Lucy’s memories of her mother, her reflections on class and race, her attempts to understand the experiences of people unlike herself. Strout handles the racial reckoning of 2020 with characteristic delicacy, showing Lucy’s limitations (she is a white woman from rural Illinois) without either congratulating her for her awareness or condemning her for her ignorance.
Collecting Lucy by the Sea
First edition (Random House, New York, 2022): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$20
- Later editions: $5–$10