I liked the idea of starting the story of Lucy by the Sea with a rather bizarre image: ping-pong balls crashing into each other. In one passage of the novel, the protagonist recalls a film she saw at school as a girl, focusing in particular on the opening scene: many ping-pong balls bouncing against a blue background, colliding with each other, then separating and returning to their original positions, until they reach a moment of stillness. It’s with this dance that Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea truly captivated me, and I believe it—among others—is the image that best represents it.
Like the balls, the characters in the book continually crash into each other throughout the narrative: brief encounters, fleeting conversations, and held embraces. Lucy herself confesses this during a broader reflection on human relationships:
What I mean is that, if we’re lucky, we run into someone. But then we always bounce away, at least a little.
After all, we only truly understand the value of time spent together—but especially the time we need for ourselves, and therefore of rebounding—when it’s taken away from us. This isn’t news. But this book is a fundamental reminder, because it recounts a period in which these two times, paradoxically, coincided: the 2020 pandemic. An indefinite season around which Strout—like many other writers—builds a story and characters in which, inevitably, we all recognize ourselves. It’s a story that takes us back to the years of fear and apathy, but it does so with the grace and sensitivity typical of this author.
Lucy is a famous writer living in New York, still mourning the loss of her second husband, David, when Covid burst into her life at the beginning of 2020. It’s William, her first husband and a scientist, who warns her, strongly advising her to abandon her apartment and move with him to Maine, foreseeing what the Big Apple would become. Lucy doesn’t believe it, she doesn’t realize it, she’s confused and doesn’t really understand what’s happening; yet, that day in New York, she decides to trust the man she once loved so much, the father of her daughters Becka and Chrissy. And so, from one day to the next, her life changes—just as we’ve seen our own life and the lives of the people we love change.
Almost constantly, there was that feeling of being underwater; as if things weren’t real.
The house in Maine is also a central focus of the narrative and, like Strout’s characters, undergoes a profound evolution over the course of the novel. With its immense sea and waves that are always the same and always different, it becomes a mirror of Lucy’s loneliness and the world. It’s a place that initially serves as a refuge, but slowly transforms into the home where the protagonist loses and rediscovers herself. In that open and silent landscape, time seems to expand and, at the same time, escape: the days pass slowly, punctuated by long walks and shared breakfasts, while the fear lingers that nothing will ever truly be the same again.
Strout delicately weaves together the relationship between Lucy and her daughters: the forced distance, the guilt, the love that is also struggle. Family bonds thus become places of resistance, while the constant fear that something will crumble forever lingers: relationships, habits, even self-image.
There are benches to sit on to talk from a distance, empty conversations, and then many, many, too many silences. There are memories: “The things we remember are strange,” Lucy thinks. It’s incredible how this novel manages to bring to the surface so many of them, precisely from that period. I can’t say exactly why this book captivated me so much: it’s certainly not the author’s best. Perhaps because it was necessary to remember what I thought I didn’t know.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
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Elizabeth Strout, Lucy davanti al mare, Einaudi, Torino, 2024
Original edition: Lucy by the Sea, Random House, New York, 2022