What's In a Name?
Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton
Viking, 208pp, £12.99, ISBN 9780241248775
reviewed by Alice Falconer
Her name is Lucy Barton, but who is she? When Lucy’s mother visits her daughter’s New York hospital bed while she recovers from a mysterious illness, she calls Lucy by childhood nicknames: ‘Wizzle,’ ‘Wizzle-dee,’ ‘Lucy Damn-dog Barton.’ Sweet as this may seem, from the opening pages Lucy’s adult sense of identity seems to dissolve in the presence of her past, her family. Strout’s previous, Pulitzer-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge (2008), considered the ways that identity arises from our relationships with others. My Name Is Lucy Barton, told ‘many years’ after Barton’s hospital stay and decades after Barton’s childhood, goes further in examining how we construct a sense of self through memory and language, and whether it is possible to name ourselves so confidently.
Quickly we deduce that some things must be passed over in silence, gestured at. ‘[My mother] wiggled her fingers, and I knew that there was too much emotion for us. I waved back, and lay flat.’ When Lucy’s (nameless) mother feels uncomfortable, she closes her eyes and withdraws completely. But this avoidance is not one-sided. When her mother gets close to Lucy’s difficult childhood, Lucy steers her away. ‘I was frightened that my mother would mention it after all these years […] I was the one to get us away as fast as we could.’ Silences, gaps and evasions are a psychic defence for both of them.
But Lucy is an author herself, and prefers ‘writers who try to tell you something truthful.’ Though she cannot bear to speak of what happened, she seems determined to capture it through writing (‘I wrote down things I could not say.’) Her hospital stay occurs during the 1980s AIDS epidemic and, compelled by the stare of an AIDS sufferer in the next room, who, unlike her mother, ‘never looked away’, Lucy tries to see her own suffering as clearly as the Chrysler Building she gazes at through her hospital window.
Yet the written word is as slippery as the verbal. Barton repeatedly deploys vast, vague concepts to describe her past. Variations on ‘beauty,’ ‘love,’ and ‘nice’ are used at least 30 times in what is a relatively brief narrative. Strout is playing a dangerous game here. These are the kinds of words a writer knows well to avoid – imprecise, unsatisfying formulations. ‘Nice’ tells us almost nothing besides a vague agreeability (and its extraordinarily shifting etymology, from ‘foolish’ through ‘fussy’ and ‘exact’, reminds us that meanings are not stable). The Chrysler Building is ‘beautiful’ to Lucy, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder – subjective and unverifiable. With no further specificity, the reader is prevented from seeing clearly.
Strout denies us the typical reader satisfaction of experiencing a detailed, precise world in order to communicate something more interesting, as this subjective slipperiness infects the emotional core of Lucy’s narrative. Her conceptions of love range from arbitrary to distressing. She ‘loves’ numerous individuals she seems hardly to know; she ‘loves’ a couple of children she sees for a few minutes because they ‘looked healthy and beautiful and good.’ This broad notion of love becomes more disturbing when she says that her doctor, whom she associates with her father (‘this lovely doctor-father man’) ‘made a fist and kissed it […] For many years, I loved this man.’ For most of us, love is not a kissed fist. Lucy seems to have defined love to suit herself, just as she does in this troubling exchange:
We cannot know what Lucy’s mother really feels. We are trapped inside Lucy’s perspective, and her mother is not the only one who closes her eyes to escape. We never fully grasp the worst of what Barton experienced, because it is told allusively, via references to ‘bad things’ or the suggestive stories of others. It is not clear to her, either. ‘I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too [when] I am suddenly filled with a knowledge of darkness.’ We are obliged to interpret, to fill in the gaps, and sometimes we find ourselves doing violence to her story, insisting that this is not really love, that she was never ‘happy.’ But like the interminable hospital scans that never explain Lucy’s symptoms, we cannot verify what really happened. The story is all we have, the words are the world.
These problems are not limited to Lucy’s own story. Two texts reappear throughout: Little House on the Prairie (1935) and the memoirs of a Native American named Black Hawk. We know that Laura Ingalls Wilder was too young at the time to fully remember the events she relates in Little House on the Prairie; she relied heavily on research. Lucy worries that Black Hawk’s autobiography, ‘which had been transcribed by an interpreter, would not be accurate, and so I wondered, Who is Black Hawk, really?’
These stories flow back into Lucy’s understanding of herself, her past. The lack of books in her childhood home Lucy felt painfully. They are an answer to ‘the question of how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act in it.’ Her identity is founded not only on her own story, but those of others, which are just as unreliable, and as subject to elision and simplification. Descended from settlers, Lucy’s viewpoint of America’s settler past, her history, shifts between Ingalls Wilder’s ‘nice family [where] the mother was kind and the father loved them very much’ to ‘tell people how your ancestors came here and murdered all the Indians, Mom!’ Her past is fragmented, suppressed or seen through layers of interpretation, and she knows it. As she says, ‘So much of life is speculation.’
What then for the author? Admitting that ‘I don’t know how others are’ seems like a death-knell for Lucy the novelist and, by implication, Strout. Faced with such difficulties, how can they ‘try to tell you something truthful’? As with ‘beauty’ or ‘love’, Lucy gives us no assistance as to what she really means. Again, it is a matter of interpretation, dependent on what we mean by ‘truth’, what we want from it. From one perspective, ‘truth’ resides in mathematical correspondence: the empty perfection of Lucy Barton = Lucy Barton. Philosophically, one could argue that a true proposition has a worldly correlate: the Chrysler Building exists. In the everyday, though, we all experience what Lucy does. Before we can say anything about what ‘really’ happened, it is filtered through memory, language, culture and the stories of others. Strout’s ambiguous, contradictory, purposely vague text captures a human truth about what it is to experience life, and to write about it.
Quickly we deduce that some things must be passed over in silence, gestured at. ‘[My mother] wiggled her fingers, and I knew that there was too much emotion for us. I waved back, and lay flat.’ When Lucy’s (nameless) mother feels uncomfortable, she closes her eyes and withdraws completely. But this avoidance is not one-sided. When her mother gets close to Lucy’s difficult childhood, Lucy steers her away. ‘I was frightened that my mother would mention it after all these years […] I was the one to get us away as fast as we could.’ Silences, gaps and evasions are a psychic defence for both of them.
But Lucy is an author herself, and prefers ‘writers who try to tell you something truthful.’ Though she cannot bear to speak of what happened, she seems determined to capture it through writing (‘I wrote down things I could not say.’) Her hospital stay occurs during the 1980s AIDS epidemic and, compelled by the stare of an AIDS sufferer in the next room, who, unlike her mother, ‘never looked away’, Lucy tries to see her own suffering as clearly as the Chrysler Building she gazes at through her hospital window.
Yet the written word is as slippery as the verbal. Barton repeatedly deploys vast, vague concepts to describe her past. Variations on ‘beauty,’ ‘love,’ and ‘nice’ are used at least 30 times in what is a relatively brief narrative. Strout is playing a dangerous game here. These are the kinds of words a writer knows well to avoid – imprecise, unsatisfying formulations. ‘Nice’ tells us almost nothing besides a vague agreeability (and its extraordinarily shifting etymology, from ‘foolish’ through ‘fussy’ and ‘exact’, reminds us that meanings are not stable). The Chrysler Building is ‘beautiful’ to Lucy, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder – subjective and unverifiable. With no further specificity, the reader is prevented from seeing clearly.
Strout denies us the typical reader satisfaction of experiencing a detailed, precise world in order to communicate something more interesting, as this subjective slipperiness infects the emotional core of Lucy’s narrative. Her conceptions of love range from arbitrary to distressing. She ‘loves’ numerous individuals she seems hardly to know; she ‘loves’ a couple of children she sees for a few minutes because they ‘looked healthy and beautiful and good.’ This broad notion of love becomes more disturbing when she says that her doctor, whom she associates with her father (‘this lovely doctor-father man’) ‘made a fist and kissed it […] For many years, I loved this man.’ For most of us, love is not a kissed fist. Lucy seems to have defined love to suit herself, just as she does in this troubling exchange:
I lay back down and closed my eyes. I said, “Mom, my eyes are closed.”
“Lucy, you stop it now.” I heard the mirth in her voice.
“Come on, Mom. My eyes are closed.”
There was silence for a while. I was happy. “Mom?”
“When your eyes are closed.”
“You love me when my eyes are closed?”
“When your eyes are closed,” she said. And we stopped the game, but I was so happy –
We cannot know what Lucy’s mother really feels. We are trapped inside Lucy’s perspective, and her mother is not the only one who closes her eyes to escape. We never fully grasp the worst of what Barton experienced, because it is told allusively, via references to ‘bad things’ or the suggestive stories of others. It is not clear to her, either. ‘I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too [when] I am suddenly filled with a knowledge of darkness.’ We are obliged to interpret, to fill in the gaps, and sometimes we find ourselves doing violence to her story, insisting that this is not really love, that she was never ‘happy.’ But like the interminable hospital scans that never explain Lucy’s symptoms, we cannot verify what really happened. The story is all we have, the words are the world.
These problems are not limited to Lucy’s own story. Two texts reappear throughout: Little House on the Prairie (1935) and the memoirs of a Native American named Black Hawk. We know that Laura Ingalls Wilder was too young at the time to fully remember the events she relates in Little House on the Prairie; she relied heavily on research. Lucy worries that Black Hawk’s autobiography, ‘which had been transcribed by an interpreter, would not be accurate, and so I wondered, Who is Black Hawk, really?’
These stories flow back into Lucy’s understanding of herself, her past. The lack of books in her childhood home Lucy felt painfully. They are an answer to ‘the question of how children become aware of what the world is, and how to act in it.’ Her identity is founded not only on her own story, but those of others, which are just as unreliable, and as subject to elision and simplification. Descended from settlers, Lucy’s viewpoint of America’s settler past, her history, shifts between Ingalls Wilder’s ‘nice family [where] the mother was kind and the father loved them very much’ to ‘tell people how your ancestors came here and murdered all the Indians, Mom!’ Her past is fragmented, suppressed or seen through layers of interpretation, and she knows it. As she says, ‘So much of life is speculation.’
What then for the author? Admitting that ‘I don’t know how others are’ seems like a death-knell for Lucy the novelist and, by implication, Strout. Faced with such difficulties, how can they ‘try to tell you something truthful’? As with ‘beauty’ or ‘love’, Lucy gives us no assistance as to what she really means. Again, it is a matter of interpretation, dependent on what we mean by ‘truth’, what we want from it. From one perspective, ‘truth’ resides in mathematical correspondence: the empty perfection of Lucy Barton = Lucy Barton. Philosophically, one could argue that a true proposition has a worldly correlate: the Chrysler Building exists. In the everyday, though, we all experience what Lucy does. Before we can say anything about what ‘really’ happened, it is filtered through memory, language, culture and the stories of others. Strout’s ambiguous, contradictory, purposely vague text captures a human truth about what it is to experience life, and to write about it.