Simple stories make deep cuts, and complex stories leave surface scratches. To repair surface scratches, I often applied toothpaste or Lemon Oil. The marks would be gone instantly. On deep cuts, be prepared to see them there for good. In the first page of Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, the author stated: “To begin with, it was a simple story: I had gone into the hospital to have my appendix out.” The book continued on to a re-count of her mother’s five-day visit at the hospital. The rest flew like a river. It’s a short book: You can finish it in one day. For me it was five hours, if accumulatively added together.

I could not help thinking what the re-appearing Chrysler Building in Manhattan, New York meant in the book, and why both the mother and the daughter looked out of the hospital window in conversations they couldn’t bear to carry on. City skyline is always beautiful, even more so in the beguiling night dress. Their lives as one, as they once were, and their lives separate, as they were present, were completely reversed in the dark hospital evenings. How could we be broken into pieces when we live under one roof, but so bound together when we are so far apart from each other? It does, and always did. The Chrysler Building is the beacon, a lighthouse, our outlook.

Lucy and her five-member family grew up in poverty. Worse, her father brought home post-war trauma, thus the silence and abuse in the household. That’s not all about her misery. As the result of the family situation, she had no friends nor pets no knowledge of outside world. She was extremely lonely—the five members did not talk to each other. Worse still, Lucy landed her own life in New York City, to be done with her past misery. It made the Gordian knot bigger. Her past isolation isolated Lucy in her present, “all that has formed her — is invisible and incommunicable to those around her”, as the New York Times review put it. It was difficult and also not difficult to understand why Lucy and her mother found happiness in gossiping about others’ misery, the failed marriages of either poor or rich families. It is dangerous to judge them by what they talked, what matters more is probably why and how they talked. They were doing it for the sake of being able to say “Mom” and “Wizzle” (the pet name of Lucy). It brought tears to my heart to realize how they love each other but they could not say it! Above the dark clouds over their roof, they were linked and tied with love. Yes, this book is about the love between a mother and a daughter, in a very tangled and complicated way. We do not have to be in Lucy’s situation to know the truth: No love is perfect, no family is spotless. We all have our scars and joy. In the end, what do we re-collect: the tears or smiles? With compassion you can carry gratitude; without it, you go with sorrow. “Each of us is Gatsby, or can be, with the potential to be reinvented and obliterate the past.” (By New York Times)

In everyone’s journey, we could come across our mentor, or mentors. For Lucy in adolescence, it was her English teacher. He asked her to take out “cheap” out of “a cheap shirt”. For Lucy in adulthood, it was Sarah Payne, a writer. She advised Lucy on her first novel, “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write this piece…remember this: You’re not doing it right.” Imperfect as we are ourselves, imperfectly we do everything. And that precisely comprises arts. Lucy’s English teacher, to my perception, taught Lucy more than Sarah. Think about it: How on earth should we judge a person by what he/she wears? By no means can we feel superior over others because of our gender, our age, our wealth, our face or body, or our profession by choice. Before and after grave, we are leveled on the ground.

These are my take-away from the book My Name is Lucy Barton. Elizabeth Strout’s award winning book Olive Kitteridge didn’t impress me much. I owed it to the audio version: it came in one ear and out in the other, without cooked in my head. Elizabeth Strout is good at throwing in unrelated anecdotes like tossing bread crumbs and having the readers to form the bread themselves. In this way, Olive Kitteridge is the same with My Name is Lucy Barton–they are filled with silence here and there, and sinking deeper and deeper as the story goes. Her choice of words is plain; the insight in the story is the real hook.

9/29/2016 Southfield, MI USA