book review oh william elizabeth strout

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Lucy barton returns — and reconnects with an old love — in 'oh william'.

Heller McAlpin

Elizabeth Strout's latest, her eighth book, had me at the first line: "I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William." The forthright, plainspoken speaker is Lucy Barton, who we came to love in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and Anything is Possible (2017), where we learned how she overcame a traumatic, impoverished childhood in Amgash, Illinois, to become a successful writer living in New York City.

In Oh William! Lucy, now 64, is mourning the death of her beloved second husband, a cellist named David Abramson. She finds some welcome distraction in revisiting her relationship with her first husband, William Gerhardt, the philandering father of her two grown daughters. She'd left William, a parasitologist who has never let the women in his life get too close, after nearly 20 years of marriage. But against all odds they have remained friendly. Seven years her senior, he is also experiencing unhappy changes in his life (which I'll leave for the reader to discover), and calls on Lucy to help navigate them.

She tells us that in her grief for David "I have felt grief for William as well. Grief is such a — oh, such a solitary thing; this is the terror of it, I think. It is like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you."

In this period when their loneliness and vulnerabilities coincide, Lucy agrees to accompany William on a trip to Maine. His mother, Catherine Cole, was born there — though she never returned after leaving her first husband. (She met her second husband, William's father, one of hundreds of German POWs from Hitler's army sent to do farmwork in Maine after the war, when he was working on her first husband's potato farm.) Lucy says she loved her late mother-in-law, who recognized the limitations of her upbringing and took her under her wing — even though Catherine told friends, "This is Lucy, Lucy comes from nothing." It's one of many memories that takes on a new cast in light of what William and Lucy learn about Catherine on their road trip.

'Anything Is Possible' Is Unafraid To Be Gentle

In 'Olive, Again,' Elizabeth Strout Revisits An Old Friend

Like My Name is Lucy Barton, Oh William! is a novel-cum-fictional memoir, a form that beautifully showcases this character's tremendous heart and limpid voice. "Because I am a novelist," Lucy explains in Oh William! , "I have to write this almost like a novel, but it is true — as true as I can make it." Lucy's determination to tell her personal story honestly and without embellishment evokes Hemingway, but also highlights fiction's special access to emotional truths.

A memoir, fictional or otherwise, is only as interesting as its central character, and Lucy Barton could easily hold our attention through many more books. What Strout is trying to get at here — how the past is never truly past, the lasting effects of trauma, and the importance of trying to understand other people despite their essential mystery and unknowability — is neither as straightforward nor as simple as at first appears. Oh William! explores William and Lucy's relationship, past and present, with impressive nuance and subtlety — including their early attraction, their missteps, their deep, abiding memories and ties, and their lingering susceptibility, vulnerability, and dependence on each other.

You needn't have read Strout's previous books about Lucy Barton to appreciate this one — though, chances are, you'll want to. ( Anything is Possible, like her Olive Kitteridge novels, is made up of linked stories.) Brief recaps of Lucy's history are deftly woven into Oh William! , which Lucy always precedes by saying she's written about the subject in more depth elsewhere. Of her grim childhood home, she comments, "I have written about some of the things that happened in that house, and I don't care really to write any more about it. But we were really terribly poor. So I will just say this: When I was seventeen years old I won a full scholarship to that college right outside of Chicago [where she met William, her science instructor] ... [and] my life changed. Oh, it changed!"

About those Ohs : It's amazing how much meaning and character can be packed into two letters that add up to an exhalation and an exclamation. The long-divorced couple's trip through Maine provides rich fodder for Lucy's head-shaking titular sighs, which convey a mixture of exasperation and fond affection for her ex-husband's foibles — from his too-short khakis to his misguided hope that by visiting a forsaken small town he'll be able to garner some goodwill from a woman who was once crowned its Miss Potato Blossom Queen.

Strout convincingly captures the fluctuating feelings that even the people closest to us can provoke, and the not-always amiable exes' recognition that "all that crap" in their past is "part of the fabric of who we are." At one point, Lucy declares about William, "At times in our marriage I loathed him. I saw, with a kind of dull disc of dread in my chest, that with his pleasant distance, his mild expressions, he was unavailable." Yet not long after, she avers that for the longest time, even after they had both moved on to other spouses, he was the one person who made her feel safe.

Being privy to the innermost thoughts of Lucy Barton — and, more to the point, deep inside a book by Strout — makes readers feel safe. We know we're in good hands.

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By Jennifer Egan

• Published Oct. 18, 2021 Updated Oct. 26, 2021

OH WILLIAM! By Elizabeth Strout

One proof of Elizabeth Strout’s greatness is the sleight of hand with which she injects sneaky subterranean power into seemingly transparent prose. Strout works in the realm of everyday speech, conjuring repetitions, gaps and awkwardness with plain language and forthright diction, yet at the same time unleashing a tidal urgency that seems to come out of nowhere even as it operates in plain sight. Consider this distillation of fact and feeling from her affecting new novel, “Oh William!”:

He never spoke of the war; my mother must have told us that he fought in it, because I was aware of that fact growing up. The way in which his post-traumatic stress (although I did not know that term at the time) manifested itself was an anxiety so great that it seemed to produce sexual urges in him almost constantly. Often he walked around the house — I am not going to say any more about this. But I loved him, my father. I did.

Strout fans will recognize the speaker as Lucy Barton, the narrator of Strout’s excellent 2016 novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” and a character in her 2017 novel, “Anything Is Possible.”

“Oh William!” picks up decades after “Lucy Barton,” with Lucy newly widowed by the death of her second husband, and her grown daughters both married. In the interim, Lucy has become the famous author of several books — at least some of which are apparently autobiographical. “Oh William!” underscores its sequel-dom to “Lucy Barton” with frequent allusions to material covered in that earlier work. It also mirrors “Lucy Barton” in structure and tone; “Oh William!” is a brief, swirling account of present-day events that rouse memories of past events and prompt a reckoning.

“William” is Lucy’s first husband, William Gerhardt, now 71, a scientist, professor, and the father of her two daughters. A series of crises in William’s life sets the novel in motion: His third wife leaves him without warning, taking their teenage daughter with her; his career begins to peter out; and an ancestry website reveals that he has a half sister living in Maine, a discovery that strongly suggests that his long-dead mother, Catherine — to whom Lucy was very close — abandoned a young daughter to marry William’s father, a German prisoner of war, in the decade after World War II.

In desperation, William turns to Lucy, and in her grief and solitude, she throws herself into helping, agreeing to accompany him (platonically) to Maine to seek out his newly discovered half sister and visit several sites from his mother’s early life. Strout devotees may experience a frisson at Lucy and William’s Maine itinerary, which grazes the fictional locus of “Olive Kittredge” (for which Strout won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009), “Olive Again,” “ Amy and Isabelle” and “The Burgess Boys,” the latter of whom are mentioned by name. “Oh William!” wears these connections lightly, but they lend the novel a prickle of cosmic convergence.

Marriage is Strout’s subject in “Oh William!” and she writes about it with brilliance, whether rendering the refuge and deliverance William and his mother provided Lucy from her impoverished childhood, or the tiny offenses that can accrue toxic symbolism in the course of a relationship: the time William took too long eating a bowl of clams when their daughters were young or the fact that the khakis he wears to begin their Maine adventure are ridiculously short.

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Oh William!

Elizabeth strout.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published October 19, 2021

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Throughout my marriage to William, I had had the image—and this was true even when Catherine was alive, and more so after she died—so often I had the private image of William and me as Hansel and Gretel, two small kids lost in the woods looking for the breadcrumbs that could lead us home. This may sound like it contradicts my saying that the only home I ever had was with William, but in my mind they are both true and oddly do not go against each other. I am not sure why this is true, but it is. I suppose because being with Hansel—even if we were lost in the woods—made me feel safe. -------------------------------------- People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.

So my husband and I took a field trip. We went up there, we went to all the places that Lucy and William go on their own trip, and I took furious notes on everything I saw. And when we came back I settled down and wrote their story. - RandomHouse Book Club kit

I would like to know—I really would like to—when does a person actually choose anything? You tell me.” I thought about this. He continued, “Once every so often—at the very most—I think someone actually chooses something. Otherwise we’re following something—we don’t even know what it is but we follow it, Lucy. So, no. I don’t think you chose to leave.” After a moment I asked, “Are you saying you don’t believe in free will?” William put both hands to his head for a moment. “Oh stop with the free will crap,” he said. He kept walking back and forth as he spoke, and he pushed his hand through his white hair. “…I’m talking about choosing things. You know, I knew a guy who worked in the Obama administration, and he was there to help make choices. And he told me that very very few times did they actually have to make a choice. [ This was taken from a conversation Strout actually had with an Obama official, about how the decisions to be made were so obvious that there was little choosing required ] And I always found that so interesting. Because it’s true. We just do—we just do , Lucy.”

He stared at me, and then I realized he wasn’t really seeing me. “Did you sleep?” I asked him, and he broke into a smile then, his mustache moving, and he said, “I did. How crazy is that? I slept like a baby.” He did not ask about my sleep and I did not tell him.

There have been a few times—and I mean recently—when I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember so quietly, yet vividly, to have it re-presented to me in this way, the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house (except to go to school, which meant the world to me, even though I had no friends there, but I was out of the house)—to have this come back to me presented a domain of dull and terrifying dreariness to me: There was no escape. When I was young there was no escape, is what I am saying.

“I have always thought that if there was a big corkboard and on that board was a pin for every person who ever lived, there would be no pin for me.”

“Because I am a novelist, I have to write this almost like a novel, but it is true – as true as I can make it. And I want to say – oh, it is difficult to know what to say”

This is not the story of my marriage, I cannot tell that story: I cannot take hold of it, or lay out for anyone, the many swamps and grasses and pockets of fresh air and dank air that have gone over us. But I can tell you this; My mother was right: I had trouble in my marriage. And when the girls were nineteen and twenty years old, I left their father, and we have both remarried. There are days when I feel I love him more than I did when I was married to him, but that is an easy thing to think – we are free of each other, and yet not, and never will be.

“I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William. William has lately been through some very sad events – many of us have – but I would like to mention them, it feels almost like a compulsion; he is seventy one years old. My second husband, David, died last year, and in my grief for him I have felt grief for William as well”

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I mean Oh Lucy! too? Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves! Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do. But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean. This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

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OH WILLIAM!

by Elizabeth Strout ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 2021

Another skillful, pensive exploration of Strout’s fundamental credo: “We are all mysteries.”

Pulitzer Prize winner Strout offers a third book linked to writer Lucy Barton, this time reflecting on her complex relationship with her first husband, before and after their divorce.

While Anything Is Possible (2017) told the stories of people among whom Lucy grew up in poverty in Amgash, Illinois, this new novel returns to the direct address of My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016). Lucy’s beloved second husband, David, has recently died, and “in my grief for him I have felt grief for William as well,” she tells us. Her stuttering, stop-and-start narrative drops this and other pronouncements and then moves on, circling back later to elucidate and elaborate. After the pain of their separation subsided, Lucy and William became friends, close enough so that when he begins having night terrors at age 69, he confides in Lucy rather than his much younger third wife. (Wife No. 2 was among the many infidelities that broke up his marriage to Lucy.) Perhaps it’s because the terrors are related to his mother, Catherine, who “seemed central to our marriage,” Lucy tells us. “We loved her. Oh, we loved her.” Well, sometimes; Lucy’s memories reveal a deep ambivalence. Catherine patronized her, referring frequently to the poverty of Lucy’s background and her unfamiliarity with the ways of more affluent people. So it’s a shock to Lucy as well as William when he learns that his mother was married before, abandoned a baby daughter to marry his father, and came from a family even poorer than Lucy’s. Their road trip to Maine prompts William’s habitual coping mechanism of simply checking out, being present but not really there, which is the real reason Lucy left him. Strout’s habitual themes of loneliness and the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person are ubiquitous in this deeply sad tale, which takes its title from Lucy’s head-shaking acknowledgment that her ex will never change, cannot change the remoteness at the core of his personality.

Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-8129-8943-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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THIS SUMMER WILL BE DIFFERENT

by Carley Fortune ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2024

A steamy, romantic summer read with a charming setting.

A florist attempts to avoid her best friend’s brother—and their powerful chemistry—on Prince Edward Island.

When Lucy Ashby visits her best friend Bridget’s family home on Prince Edward Island for the first time, Bridget gives her three rules: Eat your weight in oysters …. Leave the city behind . And, most importantly, Don’t fall in love with my brother . Unfortunately for Lucy, she sleeps with Felix basically the second her plane lands, unaware that he’s Bridget’s brother until it’s too late. Lucy has never felt understood or accepted by her immediate family, and Bridget is one of the very few people she allows into her inner circle, so Lucy’s desperate to abide by these rules. And so she and Felix try to avoid each other on every one of Lucy’s visits to PEI over the years. And, of course, they fail spectacularly, always returning to each other when they’re in between relationships. But it’s never been anything serious…Lucy makes sure of that, backing off whenever her emotions feel too strong. In her “real life” back in Toronto, it’s easier for Lucy to avoid thinking of Felix as she runs a busy floral shop, working herself into the ground. But when Bridget asks Lucy to come to PEI for an emergency girls’ trip less than two weeks before Bridget is supposed to get married, Lucy drops everything to be there for her best friend. She doesn’t expect to find Felix there, along with feelings that are stronger and more difficult than ever to ignore. Even more than jeopardizing her relationship with Bridget, Lucy is afraid that giving in to her feelings could ruin the life she’s worked so hard to build. Fortune, the author of hits like Every Summer After (2022), gives readers another refreshingly summery story full of angst, romance, and sex scenes aplenty. The PEI setting is a beautiful backdrop for Lucy and Felix’s secret hookups and Lucy’s journey of self-discovery as she learns how to stand on her own two feet as a business owner, friend, and daughter. In addition to frequent (and welcome) Anne of Green Gables references, there are oysters galore and many sandy, windy scenes that transport readers straight to the island.

Pub Date: May 7, 2024

ISBN: 9780593638880

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Berkley

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

ROMANCE | GENERAL ROMANCE | GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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Review: How Elizabeth Strout’s simplicity runs rings around more pyrotechnic novelists

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On the Shelf

Oh William!

By Elizabeth Strout Random House: 256 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

I imagine Elizabeth Strout scrawling out her novels longhand in some serene room in coastal Maine, a party of white pines standing tall outside her window. There is a quietude to her prose — even with scowly, persnickety characters like Olive Kitteridge — that exudes calm devotion. Even in her novels’ darkest moments, there’s a soft, periwinkle feeling.

Where a simple phrase will do, it does: “I was so happy.” “ Oh he is just so lonely !” “What a strange thing life is.” Lucy Barton in particular, the narrator — again — of Strout’s new novel, “Oh William!,” announces her reactions with the vocabulary of, well, a regular person. Her exclamation points (there are many) are the little stabs of intensity our emotions cycle through each day. Strout doesn’t dress language up in a tuxedo when a wool sweater will suffice. Other novelists must berate themselves when they see what Strout pulls off without any tacky pyrotechnics. Straightforward goes down so easy and feels so refreshing.

All of which makes reading “Oh William!” like coming home to a sensibility that is so smartly deployed it might go unnoticed. This is the third in a series of novels (following “ My Name Is Lucy Barton ” and “Anything Is Possible”) revolving around the Illinois-born daughter of emotionally unreachable parents, raised in an unheated garage but now ensconced among the fruits of success as a novelist in New York City. (This may be the only novel about a novelist that does not remotely concern itself with her writing, publishing or craft.)

But we shouldn’t call this a trilogy. “Anything Is Possible” was no sequel, but a series of stories building a larger universe for the first novel. “Oh William!,” in turn, is more like the next row of stitches in a knitted blanket; new patterns arise, but the overall effect is of a world filling in, growing at once larger and more intricate. “Trilogy” implies momentum, but Strout keeps looping back to find more, more, more in the recesses.

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This novel is set a few years after the events recounted in “My Name Is Lucy Barton.” (To add a layer of slight complication, that story was set in the mid-1980s but narrated some 20 years later.) Lucy’s second husband, David, has died, and she finds herself drawn to the familiarity of her first husband, William — his capable scientific mind, his confidence in moving through the world — though he is now married for a third time.

Strout’s plain style voids the soap-operatic potential of this description. Lucy’s grief surges and recedes, but her attention is fixed on Willliam’s difficulties: Shortly after his wife, Estelle, unexpectedly departs their marriage, he discovers that his mother had abandoned a child before he was born. “Wait,” Lucy asks when he calls her to come see his suddenly half-empty apartment, “She took the rugs?” Williams nods. “God. My God.” This is a level of treachery that knocks Lucy nearly as much as William.

Loneliness and longing were Strout’s big themes in “Lucy Barton” and its followup. She returns to them here like a supplicant at her prayer book: begging to understand them even just a little bit more. In that first novel, as the writer lies in a hospital bed suffering from a vague internal ailment, her mother comes to stay for five days. She tells stories about the townspeople of Amgash, Ill., who had mostly scorned and belittled the poor, isolated Barton family. (We learn more about their alienation, from their neighbors and each other, in “Anything Is Possible.”) The subtext is everything Lucy and her mother don’t say to each other: about their shivering poverty; Lucy’s father’s ugly, masturbatory outbursts; the dim looks where warm hugs ought to have been. Love — a word hardly uttered — covers them like a clear glaze, enveloping but nearly invisible.

The Lucy of “Oh William!” has not evolved beyond her lonely childhood — most of us don’t. On a trip to Maine to help William find his long-lost half-sister, she looks out the window and takes in the wide-open road, the scrub of trees. She senses the pall of a familiar emptiness — and panics. “Oh I wish I had not come!” she thinks. “I am afraid of things that are not familiar.” William’s response is “cold to [her] ears” and she tailspins further. “Oh, to panic! If you have not been there, you cannot know.”

Their marriage-cum-friendship is marked by ambivalence, mutability. “At times in our marriage I loathed him,” Lucy remarks . “I saw, with a kind of dull disc of dread in my chest, that with his pleasant distance, his mild expressions, he was unavailable.” But now they talk often, meet at a local diner for breakfasts, confide. Lucy calls William first when her second husband dies: “Oh William, help me.”

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There is a built-in tether binding some relationships, Strout suggests, like the “invisible threads” Virginia Woolf spun out across London to keep her characters connected in “Mrs. Dalloway.” The best moments in the novel are the sudden knocks Lucy feels when her thread to William twangs — that yank of disassociation we feel when we realize that to be human is to be alone.

Strout does very little here that is new, and that is a notion to celebrate. I hate writing that she tells “small” stories, because criticism of fiction by women is filled with such dismissive implications: It’s lovely of women to write these dainty little tales of domesticity and woe — pat pat pat on the head. But smallness is Strout’s strength. Her stories don’t need to be grand because human experience is largely not; it is lived on the level of the daily, the conversational, the gestural. There is wonder enough in the silence between two people to fill books even longer than these.

Which isn’t to say Strout doesn’t have a cosmic point of view. Her novels are universal, though they aren’t big or broad or grasping, like the surfeit of literary fiction that needs to announce its own importance via page count or character sprawl. Read “Oh William!” for its suggestions about how the economics of our childhood never leave us. (In the first novel, Lucy is blown away by an artist who can afford shirts from Bloomingdale’s; in this novel she lunches there regularly but never forgets her earlier self.) Read it for Strout’s careful revelations of the sandblasting of rural America after World War II.

Oh! And read it for the copious exclamation points. They’re the only ones in modern fiction I can stand.

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Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout review: so good you often forget it’s fiction

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Lucy Barton , Elizabeth Strout’s writer protagonist who hits the big time after a humble start in life, has known William for most of her adult life. They were married for 20 years, had two children, he had affairs and they both remarried. But despite all of that, she does not feel she entirely knows him – and she is still sufficiently interested to want to find out. So when he chooses her to confide in about his night terrors, using his old nickname for her, Button, she is flattered. Lucy is grieving for her second husband and William provides a welcome focus. He is an ex who she very much still has feelings for, although they are not straightforward.

This is a return for Lucy, who first appeared in Strout ’s 2016 Man Booker longlisted book which was adapted for the theatre with Laura Linney as Barton (Strout thanks Linney in the acknowledgements, saying she “unwittingly and miraculously gave bloom to this entire book”) . It also picks up on Barton’s 2017 book Anything is Possible, about characters from Lucy’s past, in her hometown of Amgash, Illinois . In My Name is Lucy Barton, William is a distant presence; she thought he was a hero saving her from her poverty stricken and difficult childhood, but the truth is somewhat different, although she makes excuses for his behaviour. Notably, he doesn’t visit her in hospital when she has to spend a month there.

Strout likes to revisit characters. Her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge has an equally compelling sequel, Olive, Again. Lucy, now in her early sixties, is a more poised character than the enjoyably crotchety Kitteridge (played by Frances McDormand in an excellent HBO adaptation). She acknowledges her own feelings, often with heart-breaking descriptions (she says that grief is solitary, “like sliding down the outside of a really long glass building while nobody sees you”) but moves briskly on to speak about others.

Now it is William’s turn and he is an interesting character, a scientist who is nicknamed Einstein because of his heavy moustache, who women seem to flock to regardless of his age (71). He is plagued by thoughts of his German father, who to William’s shame belonged to the Hitler Youth, and also of a mystery he has uncovered about his dead mother Catherine. She was beautiful and well-dressed but a domineering figure – as shown by the way she bought certain clothes for Lucy and also golf clubs to encourage that hobby. Through writing about her relationship with Catherine, Lucy also writes about herself, when she was young, alienated and desperate to be part of another family through William.

Class is a theme. Lucy is from “terribly bleak poverty”, which will always stay with her, while William feels more confident because of his prosperous background.

Strout is such a brilliant writer that you don’t have to have read My Name is Lucy Barton or Anything is Possible to enjoy Oh William! and she fills in the plot so you don’t feel lost (although you may want to go back and check them out afterwards). There are shades of Anne Tyler and also John Updike in the stories woven from the impulses and lives of people in America.

But what sets Strout apart is the way she describes people’s innermost thoughts and the nuances of their feelings. She is an intimate writer with a particular skill for writing about the thoughts that people often brush away or bury, and the result is that you often forget you are reading fiction. You feel like Lucy’s confidante.

Strout recognises that feelings, particularly in relationships, are never black and white. Lucy can both hate William and care for him at the same time. Her repeated use of the word “oh” as in the title, conveys a whole range of feelings, from disappointment to confusion and love.

Lucy isn’t an entirely reliable narrator. She is a writer and this appears in part to be because she likes talking about others rather than herself. Often, things are hinted at in short, one sentence paragraphs and then she absorbs herself in something else with a stream of consciousness about William, fixating on things like how short his khaki trousers are and how that makes her sad or how he has less authority without his moustache, rather than think about their relationship or her feelings. But she knows what she is doing and although she wavers, there is an unshowy wisdom to this book. Strout wants you to think about relationships – the book is dedicated “to anyone that needs it”.

Laura Linney returns to the role that made her for Netflix's Tales of the City revival

Elizabeth Strout: “There are very few people in the world like Olive Kitteridge”

My Name is Lucy Barton review: Laura Linney is compelling and careful in one-woman show

For dedicated Lucy Barton fans, it is satisfying to have another piece of the tapestry; to understand Lucy and William more deeply. Strout layers on different plots but you see the parallels between Catherine’s story and Lucy’s – both women who thought men would solve their problems and lead them to better lives and were not entirely satisfied.

William and Lucy’s relationship is touching and he shows her in a new light - annoying but also as a person who brings joy to life. At one point, he says this joy is what attracted him to her and it is this spirit that shines through in this warm and enjoyable segment of Lucy’s life, written by one of our best storytellers.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Hamish Hamilton, £14.99)

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Book review: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout is a delightful and emotionally honest read

Oh William!

By Elizabeth Strout

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Book review: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout has a novelist’s most desirable quality: a distinct voice. Hers is quiet, conversational, intimate. It allows her to move easily between now and then.

Her narrator, Lucy, is herself a novelist, sufficiently successful for the public library staff in a small town in Maine to recognise her and bring out copies of all her novels for her to sign when she makes an unheralded visit.

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This is Strout’s third Lucy Barton novel, and I would guess, and hope, there will be more to come.

Lucy’s second, and adored, husband has recently died. William was her first one, she his second wife; in the course of this novel his third one will leave him. Lucy and he are still, or again, good friends. They have two grown-up much loved daughters. There’s a lot of family love in this novel, as well as mysteries and difficult childhoods, for Lucy was brought up poor at a wretched farm in Illinois, and there was little love in her upbringing.

William is an academic, a chemist, now retired from teaching but still with his own laboratory. Though married again, it is to Lucy that he turns when he starts experiencing night terrors. His mother features in these.

Catherine was a strong-minded and beautiful woman who had left her first husband for William’s father, a German prisoner of war, working in the potato fields of Maine.

William knows little of Catherine’s origins – he will find out more on a trip to Maine taking with him Lucy after he learns that he may have a half-sister living there.

Rural Maine is harshly described, a place where the American dream seems to have died.

Lucy, when first married to William, was rather daunted by Catherine, a stylish, self-assured lady who played golf at the country club, but failed to persuade Lucy to take up the game. Catherine is now dead. Her story and her influence are at the heart of the novel.

Americans long pretended that there was no class system in the USA. The pretence, or wilful ignorance, was natural, for the founding document of the Great Republic declares that all were born equal. But it is of course nonsense and, unusually, class is central to this novel.

Lucy has come to love New York; it represents her escape from poverty and the low aspirations in which it holds its victims. She treasures her escape, yet feels guilty. She remembers times early in her marriage to William when they were living in Greenwich Village and she felt terrible when she thought about her parents “and the feeling that I had left them behind – as I had.” The shadow of a mother who loved her but never hugged her, and resented her escape from the miserable farm, still lies over her.

Lucy and William have formed a friendship that has survived their divorce. She never loved him as deeply as she loved her second husband, David, and with him life was more complete than it had been with William.

Yet now, it is clear that Lucy and William matter more to each other than they did when they were husband and wife. Strout unravels the mysteries of relationships deftly. Perhaps these mysteries are never – can never – be fully resolved; but they can be lived with and that is a step towards understanding and acceptance.

This is a novel that searches for the truth of these things. It is written with the lightest of hands as we follow Lucy’s flickering thoughts. There are many fine scenes, notably Lucy’s meeting with the discovered half-sister in her cherished home, a half-sister who speaks of a Catherine different from the woman Lucy knew.

Talking with her daughters, Lucy reflects that “it was strange to think of their grandmother having this life that they knew nothing about, that neither I nor William had known anything about.” But this, of course, is how it is in families.

This is a delightful novel. It rattles along so easily and agreeably in Lucy’s voice that it is only gradually that you realise how intelligently it examines the lives of its characters. The easy reading it offers is evidence of Strout’s technical mastery.

Oh William!, by Elizabeth Strout, Penguin, 256pp, £14.99

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Posted on 7 Dec 2021 in Fiction |

ELIZABETH STROUT Oh William! Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Tags: Anything is Possible / Elizabeth Strout / My Name is Lucy Barton / Pulitzer Prize winning author / US fiction

The author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge revisits some familiar faces in her new novel, Oh William!

Oh William! follows the same ensemble of characters as Elizabeth Strout’s finely honed novel My Name is Lucy Barton , and the accompanying collection of stories Anything is Possible (reviewed here ), and I did wonder what more she could bring to this new novel. She had plumbed the aches of sadness, estrangement, poverty and mental illness in her earlier work, and her evocation of living with hurt, with isolation, but also love and beauty, was piercing. What more could she wring from the familiar cast in the small town outside Chicago? I need not have doubted. Oh William! is another extraordinary insight into being human.

When the novel opens, Lucy is mourning her second husband, David, a man who was the love of her life and whom she misses deeply. William is her first husband, whom she had married soon after college, and they were married twenty years with two daughters. His affairs, her thwarted ambition, his absence, all led to the end of the marriage, but they have remained friends. When he invites her to accompany him to Maine to explore an explosive piece of family history he has uncovered, she agrees, albeit reluctantly. She, and his subsequent wives, have always taken care of him and always been under-appreciated; the rewards, in the end, not enough for any of them.

At times in our marriage I loathed him. I saw, with a kind of dull disc of dread in my chest, that with his pleasant distance, his mild expressions, he was unavailable. But worse. Because beneath his height of pleasantness there lurked a juvenile crabbiness, a scowl that flickered across his soul, a pudgy little boy with his lower lip thrust forward who blamed this person and that person—he blamed me, I felt this often. He was blaming me for something that had nothing to do with our present lives …

It is this needling from the past that propels their journey. There is no escape from the past, though the pain is buried deep. The history they explore relates to William’s mother, Catherine, who entered Lucy’s life as her prospective mother-in-law, a woman very different to Lucy’s own withdrawn, sometimes abusive mother. ‘We loved her. Oh, we loved her … She was vibrant; her face was often filled with light.’ Yet Catherine is not all she seems. Early on, a lack of empathy, a controlling presence, jar the reader, and the book turns on the slow reveal about Catherine and her past. Catherine has reimagined her life at a terrible cost.

Lucy has also recreated herself, more than once. She left her family, who live in desperate poverty, to take up a scholarship, and we understand here that in leaving William she felt she had abandoned her (grown) daughters.

But William asks her, are we free to choose, or is that an illusion, even an act of egoism? ‘We just do—we just do Lucy …’ Lucy is taken aback:

It had felt like a choice to me then. But remembering this now, I realised that also during that whole year I made no motion to put myself back inside the marriage. I kept myself separate.

What she understands is that our actions may not be self-indulgent but necessary. Likewise, we see Catherine acting to save herself. The pain she carried and which seeped into William was a consequence, perhaps inevitable. 

Strout’s ability to take us inside a character’s personal journey, to walk with them, is on every page, in everyday banalities—cleaning teeth, filling a car with petrol—and in their memories. Lucy recounts how once she was missing her parents so much she called them from the fancy lobby of the hotel where she and William were staying. Lucy suffered terrible privations in childhood, yet the loneliness of new experiences, of feeling out of place, drove her to seek comfort in the familiar, even when it was a source of hurt.  ‘And I said, I just blurted it out, I said, “Daddy, we’re in Puerto Rico with William’s mother and I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what to do in a place like this!”’ And she is comforted.

We are always in Lucy’s frame of reference. She takes us aside, into her private musings:  ‘Please try to understand this …’,  ‘I should have mentioned earlier …’ or ‘I will tell you just one more thing …’ Strout’s deliberation with words and their placement creates space, slowing us down. She uses few contractions.

The complexity of women and men is infinite and under Strout’s observant eye, the motives and actions of her characters resonate. Her handling of private trauma is as deft as ever.

Elizabeth Strout Oh William! Penguin HB 256pp $29.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

You can buy  Oh William!  from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW  here  or you can buy it from Booktopia  here .

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click  here .

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Oh William! : Book summary and reviews of Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

Summary | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | More Information | More Books

Oh William!

Amgash Series #3

by Elizabeth Strout

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' rating:

Published Apr 2022 256 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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About this book

• Reading Guide

Book Summary

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they've come from - and what they've left behind.

I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William. Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William , she confesses, has always been a mystery to me . Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are. So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout's "perfect attunement to the human condition." There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we've grown apart. At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. "This is the way of life," Lucy says: "the many things we do not know until it is too late." First published in October 2021; paperback reprint April 2022.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Why have Lucy and William stayed in each other's lives? Did you find yourself wishing they would get back together? How, if at all, did that feeling change over the course of the book?
• Compare and contrast Lucy's marriages to William and to David. How does she characterize each relationship? How does each man complement her in a different way?
• What does Lucy learn about herself through her relationship with William? What have you learned about yourself through your relationships with others?
• Discuss Lucy's relationship with her mother-in-law, Catherine. What does the story about Catherine getting rid of the coat Lucy loved say about their relationship? Did your opinion of Catherine change as you learned more about her past? If ...

You can see the full discussion here . This discussion will contain spoilers! Some of the recent comments posted about Oh William!: Discuss Lucy's thoughts on having a home without William and her view that to deny her husband the chance of comforting her was "an unspeakably awful thing." In a marriage or other close relationship sometimes one person is suffering. If the other person can comfort the sufferer it benefits both persons. But not allowing the other to comfort can create a big distance between the two. A few days before ... - Charli Fulton Do you agree with Lucy's views on class in America? Where do you see the themes of class and money appearing in the book? I agree with Lucy's feelings on class in America. She knows from her experiences growing up that without the help of a great school counselor she would probably be like her siblings. She was able to physically move on but in her heart and mind... - reene How did you feel about Lucy and William by the end of the book? I honestly found them rather self-involved. It is a rare privilege that most people do not share to have the mental energy to spend so much time chewing on old traumas. I realize they were both deeply damaged by their childhoods, especially Lucy, but... - reidob How do we get to know about the characters who populate this book? Believe it or not, I have not read any of Stout's other books but I understood the characters clearly. Lucy is very descriptive in her details of herself and other characters of the stories. I disagree that other books need to be read before ... - xandrabk How do you think Lucy and William were influenced by their parents' trauma? How were their daughters influenced by their parents' trauma? Is there a way to stop this cycle? I think Lucy, initially, was affected by her trauma such that she did not feel self value. William's parenting caused him to be a bit selfish and set in his ways. He became disappointed in his mother after finding out that he was not the only ... - xandrabk

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Reader reviews.

"Loneliness and betrayal, themes to which the Pulitzer Prize–winning Strout has returned throughout her career, are ever present in this illuminating character-driven saga... It's not for nothing that Strout has been compared to Hemingway. In some ways, she betters him." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Strout's habitual themes of loneliness and the impossibility of ever truly knowing another person are ubiquitous in this deeply sad tale, which takes its title from Lucy's head-shaking acknowledgment that her ex will never change, cannot change the remoteness at the core of his personality. Another skillful, pensive exploration of Strout's fundamental credo: 'We are all mysteries.'" - Kirkus Reviews "Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite writers, so the fact that Oh William! may well be my favorite of her books is a mathematical equation for joy. The depth, complexity, and love contained in these pages is a miraculous achievement." - Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

Author Information

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Elizabeth Strout Author Biography

Elizabeth Strout was born in Portland, Maine, and grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire. From a young age she was drawn to writing things down, keeping notebooks that recorded the quotidian details of her days. She was also drawn to books, and spent hours of her youth in the local library lingering among the stacks of fiction. During the summer months of her childhood she played outdoors, either with her brother, or, more often, alone, and this is where she developed her deep and abiding love of the physical world: the seaweed covered rocks along the coast of Maine, and the woods of New Hampshire with its hidden wildflowers. During her adolescent years, Strout continued writing avidly, having conceived of herself as a writer from early on. She read biographies of writers, ...

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Reading Guide: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

Explore Elizabeth Strout’s Booker Prize 2022 shortlisted novel  Oh William! with your book club using our guide and discover why the judges said it was ‘one of those quietly radiant books that finds the deepest mysteries in the simplest things’

Download a PDF of the reading guide for your book club

Written by Donna Mackay-Smith

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband - and longtime, on-again/off-again friend and confidante.

Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.

Bestselling author Elizabeth Strout returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any time.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

About the author

Before writing, Elizabeth Strout had a brief career in the law. She didn’t tell people about her ambition to become an author ‘because they look at you with such looks of pity. I just couldn’t stand that.’

Pity would have been misplaced since Strout has subsequently become a habitué of the best-seller lists: her third novel alone, Olive Kitteridge , has sold way more than one million copies, grossed over $25 million and was made into an Emmy-winning television mini-series. Strout ascribes her authorial career to the fact that she was ‘a very bad lawyer’ (she only practiced for six months) and that ‘my ears are always open… And people will tell you things. Boy, they really will.’ This is what gives the relationships in her books the tang of lived experience.

Elizabeth Strout

What the Booker judges said

In a nutshell

Oh William! is one of those quietly radiant books that finds the deepest mysteries in the simplest things. Strout’s gentle reflections on marriage, family, love and loneliness are utterly piercing.

On the book

Strout’s writing is steeped in compassion for human beings, damaged and disappointed, full of follies and frailties, but capable, too, of deep understanding.

On the characters

Lucy Barton is an older woman, divorced, with grown-up children, and yet still coming to terms with her own childhood and learning how little she has understood the people closest to her. Strout writes her with a capacious empathy and probing insight.

What the critics said

‘Her stories don’t need to be grand because human experience is largely not; it is lived on the level of the daily, the conversational, the gestural. There is wonder enough in the silence between two people to fill books even longer than these.’

The Scotsman:

‘This is a delightful novel. It rattles along so easily and agreeably in Lucy’s voice that it is only gradually that you realise how intelligently it examines the lives of its characters. The easy reading it offers is evidence of Strout’s technical mastery.’

The Guardian:

‘The miraculous quality of Strout’s fiction is the way she opens up depths with the simplest of touches, and this novel ends with the assurance that the source of love lies less in understanding than in recognition – although it may take a lifetime to learn the difference.’

New York Times:

‘Marriage is Strout’s subject in Oh William! and she writes about it with brilliance, whether rendering the refuge and deliverance William and his mother provided Lucy from her impoverished childhood, or the tiny offenses that can accrue toxic symbolism in the course of a relationship: the time William took too long eating a bowl of clams when their daughters were young or the fact that the khakis he wears to begin their Maine adventure are ridiculously short.’

Evening Standard:

‘What sets Strout apart is the way she describes people’s innermost thoughts and the nuances of their feelings. She is an intimate writer with a particular skill for writing about the thoughts that people often brush away or bury, and the result is that you often forget you are reading fiction. You feel like Lucy’s confidante.’

Questions and discussion points

Strout has often been praised for her realistic narrative voice. In Oh William! , the prose is deliberately pared back. Why do you think this is particularly effective in creating the everyday and something so familiar - and bringing her novels and characters to life?

The structure of Oh William! could be considered unusual. In the opening lines (p.3) Lucy addresses the reader directly, before beginning to recount details of their relationship and lives in a - for the most part - chronological manner. There are also no chapters or definitive sections within the text. Discuss the narrative structure, the author’s intention, and how that shapes your experience as a reader.

When Lucy decides to take William’s surname when they get married, she states: I had spent my whole life not wanting to be me. (p.4). What does Lucy mean by this? What is she trying to escape through the gesture of this name change?

At one point during the novel, Lucy comes to the realisation that William is the only person I ever felt safe with. He is the only home I ever had . (p.38) Why then do you think their relationship ended in divorce?

When Lucy and William’s child is born, they have dinner in a restaurant. Lucy recalls the following interaction on p. 56: ‘You know, Lucy, I think I would feel better if she had been a boy.’ It was as though something dropped deep inside of me, and I did not say anything about it. But I have always remembered that. At the time I thought, ‘Well, at least he is being honest’. But we had these surprises and disappointments with each other, is what I mean. What does Lucy mean by ‘surprises and disappointments’?

William is presented as a character who is often self-interested and checked out. He did not know the names of all the doormen though he had lived in the building for almost fifteen years; this particular doorman was one whose name William could not remember. (p. 57) Discuss how these traits affected his relationships with those closest to him.

William’s mother is a notable figure in the book. Lucy tells us: Catherine, when I first met her, would introduce me to her friends, and she would say quietly with her hand on my arm, ‘This is Lucy. Lucy comes from nothing.’ (p. 47). Discuss this in relation to Catherine’s character arc and why class seems important to her.

Never would I kill myself. I am a mother. As invisible as I feel, I am a mother. (p. 162) What does Lucy mean when she says she feels invisible, and to whom?

The Booker judges said that ‘Lucy Barton is one of literature’s immortal characters - brittle, damaged, unravelling, vulnerable and, most of all, ordinary, like us all.’ Why does Lucy, and her experience, resonate with so many readers?

People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say. (p. 119) Loneliness and the inability to communicate with those closest to us is a recurring theme in Strout’s novel. Do you think Strout’s depiction of the human condition is realistic?

Both Lucy and William are struggling to make sense of their childhoods and lives together - William’s mother, their children, Lucy’s impoverished upbringing, and so on. To what extent is it a novel about the burden of the past, or how people can never really escape their families, or how loved ones cause one another pain?

How do you think Catherine’s long-kept secret affects William – now or in retrospect – and what does it lead Lucy to understand?

What the author said

‘I think - I hope - that many readers have taken Lucy into their hearts because she is honest in what she presents, and also her voice (which is really her) is an intimate one, and yet leaves the reader enough space to enter the book on their own terms.

‘It was not a conscious decision to explore the relationship of Lucy and William at that point in time, but as the book developed I realised: “Look at this! These people - especially as I wrote their dialogue (and their silences) - really know each other in a way that goes beyond having just met in their youth.” They have a special thing, is what I felt as I wrote the book, and that is what was so fascinating for me, to try and open that up - and then to give it to the reader.’

Read more of Elizabeth Strout’s interview on the Booker Prize website .

Elizabeth Strout. © Michael Debets/Pacific Press/Alamy

Lucy Barton’s world

Viv Groskop writes:

With Lucy Barton, Strout has done something generally discouraged within contemporary literary fiction, despite being common in commercial fiction: created a universe around a character over multiple books. She has done it without turning any of these books into the obligatory prequels, sequels or any other kind of trope from genre fiction so beloved of marketing departments. So whenever Lucy Barton pops up, you can be sure that she is part of a bigger story. And yet you can also be equally sure that each book stands independently. The Lucy Barton novels are constructed in such a way that they can be discovered on the reader’s terms, not the writer’s.

There is something refreshingly trusting about this and reminiscent of classical works of fiction. Recurring characters crop up across the works of Balzac, Zola and Nabokov, travelling across novels and short stories and inserting themselves into other narratives. Strout borrows the idea, subverts it and twists it into something completely unique. In terms of plot or spoilers the order of reading is irrelevant, although arguably you do gain a certain something by unravelling Lucy Barton’s world in the same way Strout has unravelled it in her own mind.

Viv Groksop.

Resources and further reading

Elizabeth Strout interview in the Guardian

The official Elizabeth Strout website

The New Yorker feature on Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout on BBC Radio 4 show Books and Authors discussing Oh William!

Watch Laura Linney in the Broadway adaptation of My Name Is Lucy Barton

Laura Linney starred in the stage version of My Name is Lucy Barton in New York, 2020

If you enjoyed this book, why not try…

Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible

Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Quartet

Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace

Anne Tyler, A Spool of Blue Thread

Oh William!

Book recommendations

Reading list

The best books of 2022

Information

Multiple winners and nominees of the Booker Prize

Competition

Win in our competition to celebrate the Booker Prize 2022

How to follow the booker prize 2022 winner ceremony live, swansea's 'sisterhood' are the winners of the booker prize 2022 book club challenge, details announced for booker prize 2022 ceremony, watch leading performers read extracts from the booker prize 2022 shortlist, who is lucy barton how elizabeth strout created a compelling story cycle.

Writers reading writers

Elizabeth Strout on William Trevor: ‘He taught me that the writer’s voice can be quiet’

Elizabeth strout interview: 'i could feel myself getting better with each story', what everyone is saying about the booker prize 2022 longlist, calling all book clubs join our booker prize book club challenge, 13 things you need to know about the booker prize 2022 longlist, what everyone is saying about the booker prize 2022 shortlist, why you should read the booker prize 2022 shortlist, according to our judges, six things you need to know about the booker prize 2022 shortlist, meet the authors: interviews with the booker prize 2022 longlisted writers.

Book extract

Read the 2022 shortlist: an extract from Oh William! By Elizabeth Strout

Quiz: which 2022 booker-longlisted book should you read, share this page.

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Book Review: Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

Posted October 15, 2021 by WendyW in Book Review , New Release / 6 Comments

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they've come from--and what they've left behind. "Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite writers, so the fact that Oh William! may well be my favorite of her books is a mathematical equation for joy. The depth, complexity, and love contained in these pages is a miraculous achievement."--Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William. Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William , she confesses, has always been a mystery to me . Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are.

So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret--one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout's "perfect attunement to the human condition." There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together--even after we've grown apart.

At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. "This is the way of life," Lucy says: "the many things we do not know until it is too late."

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout is the third book in Elizabeth’s Strout’s Amgash Series but can be read as a stand-alone, however, it’s really best to read the series in order. The book is written all in first person POV by Lucy is an author and the book is like a conversation with Lucy about her life, and especially about her ex-husband William.

Lucy Barton tells us all about her ex-husband, William. Although no longer married, Lucy and William still have a relationship, not only do they share their two adult daughters, but they share past experiences and a history together. Oh William, is all about Lucy, telling us about her marriage to William and how they both have navigated love, loss, divorce, and love again.

At first, the writing style is a bit jarring, but after a while, I felt like I was having a conversation with Lucy. Her insights into herself and her family are intimate and thoughtful and I enjoyed this easy conversation we had while reading the book. At first, Lucy seems kind of ordinary, but as you read through the book, you realize what an extraordinary woman she is.

The story was more than just flashbacks and memories, Lucy and William work together and find out some family secrets, and learn more about each other’s background and they grow stronger as they work together.

I recommend this book to anyone who loves to read about families and relationships. I received a complimentary copy of this book. The opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

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6 responses to “ book review: oh william by elizabeth strout ”.

This sounds like an interesting book. I’m glad you can still enjoy it as a stand-alone even though its part of a series. Great review!

How much repetition did you notice in this book?

I like it when stories are set in a series but can technically be read out of order if you discover a later book in them that appeals to you.

Although I always read books in chronological order unless I genuinely didn’t know they were a later instalment of a series.

Which means that I get a little discombobulated with series like the Chronicles of Narnia that are written in non-chronological order. It was surprise to get later in that series and suddenly be flung back into the characters’ pasts. LOL! Although I totally understood why C.S. Lewis did that and soon adjusted quite well.

Anyway, good review. 🙂 If more books come out in this series, will you read them?

Yes, there was a fair amount of repetition in this book, but it’s part of the authors writing style as it’s a stream of consciousness narration. I think I would read another book in this series, but I’d go back and read the first two books first.

This look good. Thanks for the advice about reading them in order.

Thank you Kimberly.

Toby A. Smith

books, ideas, photos

OH William! – by Elizabeth Strout – independent book review – Fiction

Although I’ve enjoyed several books by Elizabeth Strout, OH WILLIAM ! was not a favorite. Although I rated it three stars on Goodreads , 3.5 is more accurate. Note: This book is #3 in Strout’s Amgash series.

Lucy Barton (a woman from a deeply disadvantaged background) and William (a more sophisticated man from far greater affluence) meet in college and marry young. William’s widowed mother Catherine welcomes Lucy into the family and becomes a central figure in their lives.

William settles into a professorship in the sciences and Lucy becomes a successful writer. But after some years together and two daughters, they divorce. Despite each remarrying, they remain friends.

So when William turns 70 and receives a gift that allows him to explore his ancestry online, it’s not surprising that he uses Lucy as his sounding board. And when he discovers a BIG family secret, William asks Lucy to take a trip to research this secret together. It sounds like a bit like a set-up to a mystery novel but the novel is much richer than that.

What the author does so exquisitely is explore relationships, emotions, and psyche –especially over time. Lucy’s upbringing, William’s relationship with his mother, Lucy’s relationship with her mother-in-law, Lucy and William’s multiple marriages, grief, and all the intricate ways people dance with intimacy throughout their lives. Strout’s examination is subtle, complex, and insightful. Don’t be surprised if you recognize people you know among these characters. Perhaps even yourself.

What keeps me from rating the book more highly is the episodic nature of the book’s narrative style. Much of it is stream-of-consciousness style (short, abrupt insertions of random thoughts). And I found that kept me a bit at a distance, not quite able to fully disappear into the story. Of course, that may have been Strout’s intent for all I know. But that distance kept me from LOVING the book. Let’s say I appreciated it instead.

I DO recommend OH WILLIAM ! It’s a quick read and very engaging. As always, her characterizations are wonderful.

More about the author, Elizabeth Strout .

You may be interested in my reviews of other novels by Strout:

OLIVE, AGAIN

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON (Book #1 in Strout’s Amgash series)

ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE (Book #2 in the Amgash series)

Discover more from Toby A. Smith

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I agree. This wasn’t my favorite Strout book. I thought perhaps it was the audio version.

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