Elizabeth Strout’s novels can be interpreted as traps. The easiest thing is to underestimate this prose. In a conversational tone, the first-person narrator, the writer Lucy Barton, hops associatively from topic to topic. Events flash past them and are reliably commented on. One could easily ignore the fact that something dark hovers over all this, for example when smoking a cigarette is narratively equivalent to a death. Death, illness, loss and silent suffering form the basso continuo of “Am Meer”.
Novel by Elizabeth Strout – Culture
