![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “I work in all different ways, and never from beginning to end,” Ms. Instead, they come to life mysteriously, organically, in stray scenes or bits of dialogue that present themselves and then, through some mysterious process that even she finds difficult to explain, eventually coalesce into a whole. ![]() Strout said she did not use her characters as pawns to make a greater point, nor as stand-ins for her own experiences, as readers often assume that writers do. Strout’s generous-hearted, deeply insightful novels, it is really about a great deal more: a terribly troubled past, a present that is slowly imploding, the yawning spaces between even the closest of people, our frequent inability to see what’s in front of us. But who knows which voice reflects whose view in the deceptively simple but many-layered world of “Lucy Barton”? On the surface, the story is about a woman trying to recover from an illness and make peace with her mother. She’s speaking to her own fictional audience, and possibly to us, too. “It’s not my job,” Sarah says sharply, “to make readers know what’s a narrative voice and not the private view of the author.” Don’t make the mistake of blurring the line between fiction and truth, a novelist named Sarah Payne warns in Elizabeth Strout’s latest book, “My Name Is Lucy Barton.” ![]()
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