My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lucy Barton says, I like writers who try to tell you something truthful. I do too. That's why I really like this book a lot. Later in the novel, the author states, the job as a writer of fiction [is] to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do. Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton exactly follows that prescription. It tells a sweet and very sad story, using simple language and a minimum number of pages. This simplicity and the absence of literary affectations make this fictional story more real than a nonfiction book would.

It feels like a sacrilege to find faults with this beautifully written book, but I need to explain why my rating is only four-and-a-half stars, rounded down. The author says, There is that constant judgment in this world and later, more explicitly, It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it's the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down. Yes, exactly! That's one of the ugliest aspects of being human. But I prefer that the author let the reader discover the truth rather than spoon-feed it.

I am unable to refrain from quoting a longish yet truly luminous fragment of simple prose: [...] it was early June, and the soybeans were on one side, a sharp green, lighting up the slighting sloping fields with their beauty, and on the other side was the corn, not yet as high as my knees, a bright green that would darken in the coming weeks, the leaves supple now, then becoming stronger. (O corn of my youth, you were my friend!--running and running between the rows, running as only the child, alone, in summer can run, running to that stark tree that stood in the midst of the cornfield--) In my memory the sky was gray as we drove, and it appeared to rise--not clear, but rise--and it was very beautiful, the sense of it rising and growing lighter, the gray having the slightest touch of blue, the trees full with their green leaves.

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