My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth StroutMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
We had a copy of this book lying around in our office, and I thought to read it because it was on the Man Booker longlist this year. I've never read this author before (but of course), so I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into.
The story is simple: Lucy Barton, our protagonist, recounts that time she was stuck in the hospital for a prolonged period of time, suffering from an unknown disease. During this time she reconnected with her mother for five days. She spends her entire time craving to be with her mother while all along mentally recalling the traumatic childhood she had. She also keeps pining over being away from her children, which I suppose is a legitimate worry, but it gets frustrating when repeated ad nauseam in a relatively short book.
We aren't quite sure if her parents were good, bad or just making the most of their underprivileged lives, but things happened when Lucy and her two siblings were young that seem inexplicable.
But Lucy doesn't cover those points with her mother in the hospital, nor does she try and make peace with what happened. No, instead, the entirety of their time together is spent on gossip about the people from Lucy's hometown. Lucy surmises, perhaps correctly, that her mother is trying to tell her something about her marriage, and that her mother's own insecurities are showing through the stories she chooses to tell.
It's a strange book, this one. The simple style means you'll get through the text in less than an evening's time, yet you won't escape into it. The structure is terribly contrived and archaic, akin to the interview-style of storytelling in films. We also don't get anywhere with the gossip, and Lucy as a character doesn't grow at all.
More often than not, the book ventures into pedantic territory with a lot of Lucy's thoughts, which would infuriate any reader, and especially infuriated me. Significant events and traumas aren't explored or explained, which was frustrating, because what's the point of mentioning that something happened if you don't explain what that something was (it's the same issue I had with that pathetic excuse of a book Serious Sweet, which also didn't explain past traumas). We don't explore what makes her parents afraid of travel, nor do we know what is wrong with her brother. And there's very little ground covered with regard to her relationship with her sister.
I don't know how this book made it onto the Booker list. Perhaps it's because the author is a Pulitzer Prize-winner, so the judges just took it for granted that this book was good. It's not that the book is bad, it's just senseless and meaningless. We follow a brief period in this one particular person's life, but we aren't able to learn anything about her, only the things that happened to her. Even those aren't that clearly written.
It ends abruptly and perhaps poignantly, so shall this review. There's really nothing else to say about this book. It exists, that's all there is to it.
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