Very near the end of Lucy by the Sea, Lucy Barton, Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable character, implores her older daughter not to have an extramarital affair. Her two cents is a sophisticated and highly effective analysis of her daughter’s—Crissy’s—psychological state. The fact that Lucy can be so insightful and so persuasive after all the self-doubt and mortification she feels, surprises us. Flabbergasts us. She has spent very nearly the whole story recounting her disappointment, her dread of the judgment of others, that we wonder at and cheer her powerful skills.
And this book-length clear-as-crystal look at Lucy’s mental processes, her internal dialogue, leads us to expect yet another moment of doubt and indecision. And the fact that Strout gives Lucy a wand to wave for her loved ones, given the hopelessness and shame of her early life, flattens us. The ringing reverberation pealing from this novel certifies again the author’s dexterity. She’s a magician; I’ve felt this way since Olive Kitteridge. Lucy by the Sea is, I’m thrilled to say, more of the same miraculous magic.
When last we visited with Lucy and her ex-husband William, they took a trip from New York to Maine. The principal framework for the novel Oh William! was that William found out, rather late in life, that he has a half-sister in a little town there. In this new entry, William insists Lucy accompany him back to Maine, to escape the Covid virus as it rampages through New York. People stand off from one another, distance and masks hold sway over all interactions, and the effect on human behavior can be hard to predict. We observe all this through Lucy’s eyes, through the lens of her background, which inclines her late in life to compassion and understanding.
And this compassion and understanding mark Strout’s treatment too of the soul searching in which all chief characters engage. Her touch never errs, her wisdom never flags. Lucy’s absence from New York forces her to feel her grief over her husband David’s death. William reflects on a life that he regrets, but he settles on a solution and reaffirms his decision to pursue it. Lucy’s two grown daughters make life-altering decisions too.
We can only be thankful that Lucy and the rest of these characters keep up their residence in the author’s vivid imagination. Take and enjoy.
Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk constructs 79 chapters—plus preface and 50-page epilogue—recounting an outbreak of plague in a fictional Mediterranean island in 1901. Along the way he portrays authoritarian government tactics in suppressing its population; backward religious scruples proscribing life-saving modern medicine; and the jingoistic tendency of inferior historians to hew their stories to align with beloved legends, and thereby to get things hilariously wrong. It’s an impressive rendering of an ingenious and captivating tale.
In the fictional eastern Mediterranean island of Mingheria, which at the beginning of 1901 is a province of the Ottoman Empire, bubonic plague breaks out, and the imperial government in Istanbul sends a medical official, a doctor celebrated in political as well as medical circles, to impose a quarantine. News of his arrival spreads quickly on the island, but he is very soon summarily despatched, murdered by a faction that wants no measures taken against the epidemic nor anything else to do with modern medicine.
We soon learn that this violence stems from some combination of Islamic teaching and a desire to intimidate the Orthodox Greeks—half the island’s population— into leaving and returning to Greece. The authorities then send another doctor, a Muslim, one famous for his administration of quarantines in other Ottoman provinces, and this one is newly married to an out-of-favor Ottoman princess. He labors mightily with the provincial governor to bring both the fundamentalist fanatics and the disease under control.
Through a series of unlikely events which nonetheless lead to inevitable human responses, the Mingherians cut themselves off from all communications from the Ottoman empire, declare their independence, and set up a new government. Before very long, the work of controlling the epidemic is shot to hell when a leading sheikh stages a coup and becomes briefly the head of state. All quarantine measures are abolished and the plague increases in virulence and begins a new terrible rampage through the population.
In describing these events, Pamuk demonstrates his mastery of human motivation and emotion; he holds up for our edification the idiocy, the venality, and the lust for power which drive politics. To get a flavor for his tone and stance toward these proceedings, understand that the governor leans heavily on a secret police service called the “Scrutinia,” and its director is called the “Chief Scrutineer.” His take on government ethics is an oppressive classic: in Mingheria, political enemies are routinely arrested and held without charge or due process. The sectarian regime which briefly holds power looks very much the same.
I felt for a time while reading that the story was a miniature treatment of the Ottoman Empire itself, a microcosm. The author mentions more than once that the empire was referred to as “The Sick Man of Europe,” and I took the pestilence as a stand-in for the decay that infected it. But the issues of authoritarianism, and the utter failure of regimes which take their legitimacy from religion, are much bigger than one outdated empire. They are for all time, in all places.
Pamuk wraps his story up in a framework of a serious historian working with primary sources, and thus adds a clever layer of play for the reader: the light, almost tongue-in-cheek tone of the preface contrasts with the serious theme of the strife between the old and hackneyed against the new and proven. He also wants to poke fun at the writing of history, by presenting an apparently rigorous treatment of what happened and how these events represent a confluence of historical forces, while also poking jabs at how often history is simply a colorful embellishing of outright falsehoods.
I’m impressed that this author can clothe such a sustained narrative in garments of fancy, while still weighing in so bluntly on superstition, murderous greed, and official criminality. Clearly it holds manifold attractions for today’s discerning reader. Its depth and breadth lead to length, but the sustained energy and interest are also quite worth it.
In On the Savage Side Tiffany McDaniel sets herself the challenging task of building a novel out of the gruesome and notorious Chillicothe Six murders of 2013-2014. The Chillicothe Six were women marginalized by the town and the town’s authorities, whose approach to the growing body count is a yawn and a shrug: they were either tricked or coerced or forced into drug addiction and prostitution, or their families simply bequeathed these conditions to them. This is a stunning, challenging work, a full flowering of a fine novelist’s powers and compassion.
The first-person narrator, a woman in her early twenties named Arcade Doggs, tells the story of herself and her twin sister Farren; they had the bad luck to be born to heroin addicts in a small town in Ohio. Farren frequently spoke in rhymes, and would declaim her verses while standing among the blossoming daffodils, so she came to be called Daffodil Poet, or Daffy for short. Arc and Daffy associate with other women of the street and after they befriend them, these women start to disappear and wash up dead on the shore of the river.
With unblinking honesty this book portrays the abuse and the ruined lives some women must endure. The fact that these crimes against women occur, and by whom they’re perpetrated, is met by vast indifference, as I have said. We have a clear object lesson here about the forgotten and ignored sex workers, many of whom are under the thumb of amoral men who simply enjoy being cruel.
Part murder mystery, part psychological thriller, and part parable, this plaintive novel pulls us into the squalid and essentially hopeless world these women occupy. After an early, rather desolate stretch, the book begins to soar as Arc and Daffy try to track down who’s doing the killing. Predictably enough, the police make an assumption early on that the murders of the young women are committed by one of their own.
Rather than treat these real-life crimes in magazine pieces or podcasts, McDaniel boldly sets her compass in a more rewarding direction. More than simply producing a fictionalized account of a ghastly episode, she has injected elements of wonder, and mystery, and psychological depth. The surprising hyperbolic course the story follows before it finishes, proves the author’s technical mastery, as if further proof were needed after Betty and The Summer that Melted Everything. If you savor technical mastery bolstered by an out-of-the-blue surprise at novel’s end, take up On the Savage Side.
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