Lucy by the Sea - Elizabeth Strout

 

I feel like I have written this before, but while I very much love the writing of Elizabeth Strout and the atmosphere that she is able to create with her books, all of them - perhaps with the exception of the ones about Olive Kitteridge - blur into one. Lucy by the Sea was a clear demonstration of that, as I remembered having read My Name Is Lucy Barton, but in spite of its title I couldn't for the life of me recall who Lucy Barton actually was...

I have yet to find a book whose handling of the recent pandemic I find compelling, perhaps because it's something that we have all lived through. On the plus side, at least this book was a clear upgrade compared to the rather miserable Day by Michael Cunningham. 

What I did like about this book, though, was the narrative arch of William (Lucy's husband). I must confess I was rather ticked off by the brave "knight in shining armour" (who at the same time has the foresight of "the stoic man of science"), but in the last few chapters it was really interesting to see his own daughters discuss with Lucy the probable selfish reasons behind some of his actions, and Lucy recognizing them - perhaps having known that was the case all along, and reclaiming her own agency.  

Day - Michael Cunningham

It had been years since I had read anything by Cunningham and I was very excited to read this book. Too excited, as it turned out. 

I am now honestly wondering if The Hours and A Home at the End of the World were really so ground-breaking, or whether I had simply read them at a time in which gay American literature was a complete unknown to me. 

I found this book to be of a borderline astounding banality (hey, most likely I didn't get its meaning!), but I felt that the pandemic was just used a useful literary tool, the characters were not just unlikeable (which I can live with, we don't always need to love a novel's characters) but also unremarkable. And seriously, when the great idea is interrupting the narrative and only looking at one day in a number of consecutive year, there must be something wrong with your work (I mean, if David Nicholls, with his mass-appeal and lack of pretence, had done it better, you must really go back to the drawing board!). 

Companion Piece - Ali Smith

  

Yet another distinctively Ali Smith-esque book, and yet another very pleasant read. 

But that got me wondering: has Ali Smith reached her plateau as "amazing author, but maybe not the best of her generation"? It feels like a pretty good plateau to be completely fair, but the fact that the style, the pace and the prose in her novels is always so easily identifiable after a while to me is suggestive of someone who experiments, but mostly within his/her comfort zone. 

Still, I'll pick up an Ali Smith novel pretty much any time I see one, in particular as she pretty much covers and analyzes contemporary events as they happen, but I'm not going to be looking forward to the next one in the same way I was when I had just started to discover her.