Location, location: the influence of place and setting.
Nico Callaghan on My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
My Name Is Lucy Barton is a faux-memoir-as-novel focused around the titular first-person narrator’s time stuck in a hospital bed in New York City. While Lucy does detail her life growing up in poverty on the outskirts of a small town in Illinois — and her subsequent life, marriage, motherhood in NYC — via nonchronological sketches, it is an almost unbroken five-day period in which her mother sits by her bedside, and the slow fallout it inspires across Lucy’s life, that operates as the central narrative.
The location of the hospital room acts as a literary hook, and this is key to understanding Strout’s craft. The novel grows compellingly heavy with the weight of familial afflictions (misery, love, fear, trauma), but Strout circles these quite dark concepts at her own pace. She lets the spare conversations of these two women in this one room, and Lucy’s own observations, reveal the very troubling secrets of their family life gradually, in a rather unorthodox way.
Story-guru, Robert McKee puts it this way …
… the larger the world, the more diluted the knowledge of the writer, therefore the fewer his [sic] creative choices and the more clichéd the story. The smaller the world, the more complete the knowledge of the writer, therefore the greater his creative choices.
The unadorned space that contains these spare, uncomfortable, compelling half-conversations between these two women isn’t a liability for Strout to overcome. It is a strength in the hands of a writer who, by virtue of her skill and craft, is also able to momentarily drop the reader into a traumatic childhood experience, or a momentous writing lesson at some retreat, without leaving that ubiquitous hospital bed too far from the reader’s peripheral vision.
There are other physical features with that location that Strout employs to illustrate Lucy Barton’s rich interiority, and the pained love between mother and daughter, one is the Chrysler Building, a lone visible landmark through Lucy’s hospital room window.
Maybe it was the darkness with only the pale crack of light that came through the door, the constellation of the magnificent Chrysler Building right beyond us, that allowed us to speak in ways we never had … I was so happy, speaking with my mother this way!
A reading of Lucy Barton shouldn’t disregard Strout’s ability to stretch so much character and depth out of other locations in the novel. There’s Lucy’s neighbour Jeremy’s apartment, “… clean and spare … art on the walls that made me understand then how far apart he and I were”, not to mention the breathtaking final passage of the novel.
At time these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house in the autumn … the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as though it could not stop going on in its beauty … as though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me.
The reader learns so much of Lucy’s character through her observations and her inscrutable method of recording them: her fears, her patience, and her generous eye for people. However, the locations in which Strout builds these encounters are just as important — and an emerging writer has a lot to learn from this technique. The notion of placing characters in a location may seem at first merely a physical prerequisite for a narrative to unfold, but with the right approach to craft, the location can become its own powerful literary device. An important consideration to keep in mind.
