Lucy Barton meets her ex-husband William at New York’s LaGuardia Airport to fly to Maine with him. William, a man in his early seventies, appears in a somewhat strange elevator: his trouser legs are too short, the color of the socks does not match the trousers at all. “Oh, William,” sighs Lucy, the first-person narrator of the novel, to herself, twice. This “oh”, which can turn into an “oh” depending on the situation, may contain everything that defines the relationship between the two protagonists of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel. It’s a sigh that can sound desperate, somewhat reluctant, but also mocking; lovingly, but always colored with a touch of nostalgia. Which brings the tone of “Oh, William!” would be characterized.
Elizabeth Strout is rightly considered a philanthropic writer, even if that in itself is not a literary quality criterion. She looks at her figures with a keen eye for detail, but at the same time impregnates them with a protective coat of sympathy. The writer Lucy Barton has already made her third appearance in Strout’s new novel. In “The Imperfection of Love” from 2016, Lucy reflects on growing up in poor circumstances during a hospital stay.
In the narrative series “Everything is Possible”, published two years later and condensed into a novel, she returns, after more than two decades, to the small town from which she comes, after having made it to success in New York. Elizabeth Strout, who turned 65 this year, is now taking up all of these motifs again. At the center, however, is a marriage that has failed, at least at first glance, because it is noticeable that the relationship between Lucy and William has by no means worsened after their separation.
He talks about his nightmares, she recommends sleeping pills
Lucy sums up the supposedly irrefutable facts on the first two pages of the novel: David, her second husband, died about a year ago. She had previously been married to William, a biologist she met in college, for nearly twenty years; he was a lecturer, she a student. The two have two grown-up daughters together. Williams’ third wife, it soon turns out, left him recently, just as Lucy left him at the time, ostensibly because of his notorious infidelity. At least that’s how Lucy portrays it, especially to herself.
Elizabeth Strout’s books are often characterized as entertaining, smart, but not particularly sophisticated. “Oh, William”, however, is constructed much more complex than this rather cautious narrative voice would lead us to believe. Strout tells in a kind of inverted onion skin principle, in which the characters and their shared story, through the almost incidental addition of one layer after the other, increasingly gain in depth, but also in depth.
Incidentally, Lucy at some point remarks that not only William betrayed her during their marriage, but that she herself had an affair with a Californian writer. The gentle melancholy of this narrative voice suggests a form of hurt, of tolerance that is only conceivable in one direction. She once said it was bent like a tulip stem after separating from William, but: “From then on I began to write more truthfully.” It becomes all the more striking when Elizabeth Strout suddenly turns her perspective and directs the focus of the outside world on her narrator.
Elizabeth Strout: Oh, William! Novel. Translated from the English by Sabine Roth. Luchterhand, Munich 2021. 224 pages, 20 euros.
“Oh, William!” is a life and love balance book whose psychological engine is fear. There is hardly a word, apart from “Ach” and “Oh”, that should be used as often as “fear”. The fear of being alone. The fear of being abandoned. The fear of missing out on opportunities in life. In the first scene of the novel, William tells Lucy about his nightly anxiety attacks. She spontaneously recommends a sleeping pill. The fears of the characters are anchored in their respective family stories, which the first-person narrator Lucy gradually reveals.
The reason for the trip to Maine is Richard’s discovery that he apparently still has a half-sister his mother Catherine never told him about. Catherine left her first husband, a potato farmer, head over heels for William’s father. He was a German prisoner of war who had been brought to the USA for the harvest service. As an American war veteran who fought against the Germans in the Huertgen Forest, Lucy’s father could not forgive his daughter for marrying William.
As believable as Lucy’s story of rising stars from desperate and violent circumstances is, Elizabeth Strout’s narrative of Williams’s traumatization with its German roots is overdetermined, and was reinforced by a visit to the concentration camp in Dachau. The causal chain of German origin, a feeling of guilt in the face of the gas chambers and inability to relate is a somewhat gimmicky short circuit that remains as an assertion in the novel without going into any deeper detail. However, this does not change the basic finding that “Oh, William!” is a mature book that asks the question of which emotional components make up a love over the decades that remains even when it fails.
Lucy Barton was looking for an authority and realized late that she was wrong, at least about William. “Our intimacy,” she says, “has turned into something horrible.” Still, it’s there, and Strout is smart enough at this point not to be more explicit. Another realization Lucy: “William, you married your mother.” The readers of this novel suspected this earlier than its narrator. Oh!