There are pieces of me in every character, because that’s my starting point, I’m the only person I know They’re all meditations prompted by the arrival of her estranged mother, whose expressions of love are even more compromised than the doctor’s raised fist. These nine weeks of her recovery become a lifetime – figuratively in terms of her boredom and loneliness, and structurally, as Lucy tells the story of her childhood, marriage and, most important of all, how she became a writer. Lucy is recovering in hospital after a mysterious infection following the removal of her appendix. In both its deficiency (an expression of tenderness curbed by protocols both professional and personal) and its sincerity (the militant earnestness of the salute), the gesture seems to contain everything Strout is saying about love: that it’s hard and awkward and will always be inadequately expressed, but that it’s also something we need to grab and hold in our fists. E arly in Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, the narrator, a doctor, after wishing his patient good night and leaving her hospital bedside, “made a fist and kissed it, then held it in the air as he unswished the curtain and left the room”.
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