Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Lucy Barton returns and it’s great to have her back!
In ‘Oh William!’ Lucy has just lost her beloved husband David and finds herself spending time with her former husband William, the philandering father of her daughters with whom she has remained friendly. William is also struggling and in the midst of it all receives a genealogy gift which leads him (and Lucy) to Maine in search of his mother’s little known past and a well kept secret.
Brief recaps of Lucy's history from the previous books are deftly woven into Oh William! adding to the patchwork that is her life from impoverished, traumatic childhood to succesful author.
‘Oh William!’ is a novel / fictional memoir, a form that is a perfect fit for Lucy’s personality. From the very start you become the willing companion to Lucy’s attempts at figuring things out as she goes along.
This is an intimate, at turns surprising, at turns quite moving novel, where our main character is constantly asking herself questions in a quest to better understand herself and others.
‘Please try to understand this:
I have always thought that if there was a big cork board and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.
I feel invisible is what I mean. But I mean it in the deepest way. It is very hard to explain. And I cannot explain it except to say - oh, I don’t know what to say. Truly it is as if I do not exist, I guess is the closest thing I can say. I mean I do not exist in the world.’
In Oh William!, Elizabeth Strout proves once again that she is a master of a non linear form that relies less on plot and more on defining moments in time and in relationships - moments that seem random at first but turn out to be pivotal. And once again we are gifted with characters so interesting, multilayered and complex, so real, that we don’t quite know how to feel about them. Just as in real life.
As Strout herself has said about the novel: “I am never really interested in Good or Bad, but instead in all the murky imperfections of people that make up their lives.”
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