“ My Name Is Lucy Barton confirms Strout as a powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships, weaving family tapestries with compassion, wisdom and insight. If she hadn’t already won the Pulitzer for Olive Kitteridge, this new novel would surely be a contender.”
Politics & Prose: Elizabeth Strout with Tayla Burney
With her fifth novel Strout has created a dynamic, engaging storyteller in the eponymous Lucy, a successful writer and mother of two-but, to her own mother, still just a defiant child.
Elizabeth Strout, "My Name Is Lucy Barton" Politics & Prose, Washington, D.C. January 16, 2016 See also: Tayla Burney, Elizabeth Strout On Depicting Poverty In Literature, The Rush To Judgment And The Role Of Literature
LARB: A Quiet, Mystical Novel
“This quiet, mystical novel with its shy, withdrawn heroine reminds me of a form of prayer…. Lucy’s light, like the Chrysler Building, illuminates small, often unseen, indignities and acts of love. In Strout’s hands this city of teeming millions appears quiet, magical, focused.… The soft, slow, Didionesque rhythm of Lucy’s speech suggests we are about to hear a fairytale of Manhattan.”
The New Yorker: Beautifully Unsentimental
“Much of this beautifully unsentimental novel takes place over five days in a New York hospital, where Lucy Barton, the narrator, is recovering from surgery.… “Lucy comes from nothing,” one character says. But Lucy knows that no one comes from nothing: we’re haunted by our past every day. ”
Vogue: Olive Kitteridge Author Elizabeth Strout on Her Potent New Novel
“New York City, in literature and life, tends to find a place for everyone—even those of us who arrive wearing the wrong clothes, missing the irony, at sea amid allusions to prep schools and psychotherapists and summer houses. Social class, that most discomfiting subject for Americans, is at the heart of Elizabeth Strout’s potent new novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton (Random House), which tells the story of a woman so strikingly different in temperament from Strout’s most famous creation to date—Olive Kitteridge, who made an HBO-Pulitzer juggernaut out of wit and irascibility—she seems to have almost been created in her relief.”