Collective grief for the pandemic’s toll brushes against more private tragedies: infidelity, miscarriage, impotence, widowhood. Lucy by the Sea makes the pandemic personal. Safe and sound-if slightly out of place-in Crosby, where the inhabitants have no great love for “out-of-towners,” Lucy and William come to terms with their place in the world and in each other’s lives. Lucy grows closer to William as they worry about their daughters Chrissy and Becka and their city from afar. Once her ex-husband, William, persuades her to leave New York in March 2020, Lucy retreats with him to a house in Crosby, Maine, owned by Bob Burgess (of Strout’s 2013 The Burgess Boys). In this third Lucy novel, Strout brings her gift for the small scale to a global pandemic. We most recently saw her in Oh William! (2021), in which Lucy joins her ex-husband on an odyssey to meet his estranged half-sister. We first met Lucy in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), in which a convalescent Lucy comes to terms with her impoverished childhood and an ambivalent relationship with her mother. In Lucy by the Sea, Strout continues the story of one of her most beloved characters against the backdrop of COVID-19. From her debut Amy and Isabelle (1998) to her Pulitzer Prize-winner Olive Kitteridge (2008), Strout depicts a world of interconnected individuals, most of whom reside in small-town Maine. Her interest is in the local and the particular. Like the works of Alice Munro, Strout’s novels are portraits of unremarkable, profoundly human lives. Elizabeth Strout paints with a fine brush on a small canvas.

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