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‘Lucy Barton’ Review: Laura Linney Finds Her Perfect Match

Ideally cast as a plain-spoken woman made of quiet steel, she acts the way Elizabeth Strout writes in this compelling adaptation of the 2016 novel.

By Ben Brantley

The title character of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” Rona Munro’s crystalline stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s 2016 novel, is hardly a woman of mystery. On the contrary, as embodied with middle-American forthrightness by a perfectly cast Laura Linney, in the production that opened Wednesday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Lucy may be the most translucent figure now on a New York stage.

Feelings seem to register on her face before her thoughts have a chance to catch up with them, so that we know when she’s hurting or happy almost before she does. A New York writer who grew up in rural Illinois, Lucy Barton is surely someone we can trust to speak plain. What a relief to be in the company, for once, of a thoroughly reliable narrator.

And yet mystery — truly unfathomable and utterly ordinary — is at the center of this deceptively modest Manhattan Theater Club production, which originated in London and is directed with quiet care by Richard Eyre. I’m not referring to the classic suspense-making withholding of information that is usually a requisite of entertaining storytelling.

Nor do I mean those moments in which Lucy, recalling a loveless childhood in poverty on an isolated farm, slams on the brakes of her narrative as she stumbles on a memory she would rather not talk about now. Give her time; she’ll come back to it.

But Lucy also knows that full transparency does not equal full knowledge. This is true even when your primary sources are your own heart and mind.

“I still am not sure it’s a true memory,” Lucy says, after describing the sadistic public humiliation of her brother by her father on the streets of a small town. “Except I do know it, I think. I mean: It is true …” That final affirmation rings slightly hollow.

Because of course we can’t know the full truth of any person, including our own self. That’s part of what makes life so sad; it is an even larger part of what makes life so wondrously fascinating. Every breath of Linney’s performance acknowledges this contradiction.

Plays adapted as monologues from memoirs and close first-person fiction are seldom satisfying onstage. The magic that pulses in a book can disintegrate when these same words are interpreted by a performer who isn’t, as it were, on the same page. (When the great actress Vanessa Redgrave performed the great writer Joan Didion’s memoir “The Year of Magical Thinking” on Broadway, the result wasn’t a doubled greatness, but a dilution of the singular strengths of each.)

Linney and Strout, in contrast, are almost seamlessly well-matched. Other actresses have beautifully portrayed Strout characters onscreen, notably Frances McDormand in “ Olive Kitteridge .”

But what Linney is being asked to do here is to embody not only a fictional person but also the literary voice that shaped that person. And using the artfully shaded directness she has shown both on film (“You Can Count on Me”) and stage ( “ Sight Unseen ,” “ The Little Foxes ”), Linney indeed acts the way that Strout writes.

As a storyteller, Strout’s Lucy is almost apologetic in her humility. But she is also possessed of an underlying strength that knows that she has had what it takes to not only endure but prevail.

The setting of the play is largely a hospital room, evoked in Bob Crowley’s set by little more than an institutional chair and bed, with transformative lighting by Peter Mumford. (Video design by Luke Halls, which turns the hospital window into an aperture onto a hazy past, is fine, though I could have done without the intrusive melancholy music.)

This is where many years ago, a younger Lucy spent nearly nine weeks of her existence, with a life-threatening infection that is never fully identified. Her hospitalization reunites her with the mother she hasn’t seen in years.

In the scenes that follow, Lucy often becomes her mother — or rather Linney becomes Lucy becoming her mother. This is an important distinction to make, since Linney is not trying to create another, autonomous character here.

When Lucy speaks as her mother, it’s with a sort of descriptive physical shorthand, conjuring sharp edges and a nasal twang. The caricature in the imitation underscores the distance between what Lucy came from and what she has become. But now, in extremis, all Lucy wants is mommy , and she wants mommy to tell her stories.

And though she begins reluctantly, Lucy’s mother turns out to be a corn country Scheherazade, with successive stories of local women who aspired above their station and usually came to bad ends. They are familiar tales and yet utterly distinctive from one another, with startling details that suggest the perversity of flailing souls who misread their own intentions.

“People,” Lucy says, wonderingly, after her mother finishes an anecdote about a runaway wife. Her mother echoes, “People.” It’s a gorgeous moment of fleeting complicity between mother and daughter.

As for subjects closer to their Amgash, Ill., home, especially Lucy’s tormented father, her mother sidesteps those with discomfort and disapproval. It is for her daughter to fill in those gaps for us, with accounts of the kind of numbing, oppressive and outright abusive existence that so many people accept as a life sentence.

Lucy did not, though. Why? Her trajectory from childhood to college, to marriage and motherhood, and ultimately to a career as a successful fiction writer, is fairly conventional in summary. It sounds like one of those inspirational survivor stories, of success against the odds, which are regularly packaged for mass consumption.

But Lucy conveys an abiding air of surprise that all this happened to her . Linney’s presence here is deferential, almost shy. From the moment she enters, walking quickly and talking briskly, you sense that it requires conscious, self-preaching will power for her to tell us all this.

But when Lucy says she has become ruthless — as those who first knew she wanted to be a writer advised her she would have to be — we believe her. This means that the truths she is telling hurt — us and her. And they of course aren’t the whole truth.

But aren’t we grateful for the alchemical, unquantifiable mix of factors that allows this woman — embodied by this actress, at this moment, in this place — to share with us so raptly what she knows, or even thinks she knows? When Lucy says, with a satisfaction that’s bigger than happiness, that “all life amazes me,” we feel exactly what she means.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Tickets Through Feb. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

Ben Brantley is the co-chief theater critic for The New York Times. He has been a staff critic since 1996, filing reviews regularly from London as well as New York. Before joining The Times in 1993, he was a staff writer for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. More about Ben Brantley

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MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON

by Elizabeth Strout ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 5, 2016

Fiction with the condensed power of poetry: Strout deepens her mastery with each new work, and her psychological acuity has...

From Pulitzer Prize– winning Strout ( The Burgess Boys , 2013, etc.), a short, stark novel about the ways we break and maintain the bonds of family.

The eponymous narrator looks back to the mid-1980s, when she goes into the hospital for an appendix removal and succumbs to a mysterious fever that keeps her there for nine weeks. The possible threat to her life brings Lucy’s mother, from whom she has been estranged for years, to her bedside—but not the father whose World War II–related trauma is largely responsible for clever Lucy’s fleeing her impoverished family for college and life as a writer. She marries a man from a comfortable background who can’t ever quite quiet her demons; his efforts to bridge the gap created by their wildly different upbringings occupy some of the novel’s saddest pages. As in Olive Kittredge (2008), Strout peels back layers of denial and self-protective brusqueness to reveal the love that Lucy’s mother feels but cannot express. In fewer than 200 intense, dense pages, she considers class prejudice, the shame that poverty brings, the AIDS epidemic, and the healing powers—and the limits—of art. Most of all, this is a story of mothers and daughters: Lucy’s ambivalent feelings for the mother who failed to protect her are matched by her own guilt for leaving the father of her two girls, who have never entirely forgiven her. Later sections, in which Lucy’s dying mother tells her “I need you to leave” and the father who brutalized her says, “What a good girl you’ve always been,” are almost unbearably moving, with their pained recognition that the mistakes we make are both irreparable and subject to repentance. The book does feel a bit abbreviated, but that’s only because the characters and ideas are so compelling we want to hear more from the author who has limned them so sensitively.

Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4000-6769-5

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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BOOK REVIEW

by Elizabeth Strout

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SEEN & HEARD

PERSPECTIVES

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Jewell

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Exploring Family Trauma in “My Name Is Lucy Barton”

On the subject of his vocation, Philip Roth liked to quote Czeslaw Milosz : “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished.” It’s a great aphorism, pithy and cavalier, as emphatic as a gunshot. To write is to declare a loyalty that runs deeper than blood, to make a pledge to the self and its expression; to write well is to tell the truth about what you have seen, starting with where—and who—you come from. That, anyway, is what Milosz, and Roth, felt, and they make the selfishness at the heart of a writer’s life sound like the glorious liberation it is. But there’s also a riskier exposure at stake. The writer who bares others’ secrets must also bare her own, standing vulnerable before the people who purport to know her best. When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished, not just because the child is bound to tell the truth about her parents but because she must tell the truth about herself.

Elizabeth Strout’s novel “ My Name Is Lucy Barton ” is the story of a writer reckoning with the legacy of a scarred family life and slowly coming to terms with the costs and the rewards of her art. When Lucy is in her early twenties and newly married, she moves with her husband to New York, where they live in the West Village. Lucy is from Amgash, Illinois, more of a pinprick on the map than a town proper, and she grew up poor, sharing a single room with her brother, her sister, and her parents, a seamstress and a repairman of farm machinery; there was no heat, no toilet, and never enough to eat. Lucy got good grades, though, and escaped to Chicago on a scholarship. And she began writing stories. Two have been published, but she is shy about saying so. A neighbor takes an interest in her and, when he learns what she does, advises her to be ruthless. Lucy is caught short. “I did not think I was or could be ruthless,” she tells us. How she learns to become so is the subject of this quiet yet surprisingly fierce book.

“My Name Is Lucy Barton” was published in 2016 and quickly landed at the top of the Times best-seller list, bumping down “ The Girl on the Train ,” a thriller about a scorned, alcoholic woman, and “ All the Light We Cannot See ,” a historical heart-tugger about a blind one. Evidently, people also wanted to read about a more familiar sort of woman, a type almost too recognizable to warrant sustained attention—that is, one who suffers doubt but holds out hope for clarity, who applies herself imperfectly but insistently to the task of living.

Now they can see her, too, in the form of Laura Linney, who stars in a one-woman adaptation of Strout’s novel (directed by Richard Eyre, at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman). The set, designed by Bob Crowley, is minimal. A single hospital bed and a utilitarian, nondescript armchair occupy the stage. Behind the furniture are three nested screens, onto which are alternately projected the Chrysler Building—faintly shimmering by day, a bright beacon in the murky city sky by night—and the corn and soy fields of Lucy’s childhood, explosively green, as if touched up with Hulk-colored food dye. (Luke Halls did the video design.) Linney, in tapered slacks and a long, loose cardigan, strides out, to inevitable applause—the audience sits onstage as well as in the house—and, as Lucy, speaks directly to us. Some years ago, she says, she came to the hospital with a ruptured appendix and developed a mysterious and undiagnosed illness that kept her there for nine weeks. (This was in the mid-eighties, during the height of the aids epidemic; later, she will tell us of seeing a hospital door marked with a yellow sticker, a sign of plague within.) Her husband rarely came to see her, and, when her two young daughters visited, they were brought by a family friend. Lucy’s only regular contact was with a kind doctor, who seemed to feel fatherly toward her, visiting her daily, beyond the normal call of duty.

Then, one day, she woke to find her mother sitting in the chair by her bed. It had been years since Lucy had seen her; she had never before come to New York. Lucy’s mother—we don’t learn her name—is an ambiguous presence, part comfort, part threat. She calls Lucy by her childhood pet name, Wizzle; Linney distinguishes her with a cragged, smoky voice, whose flattened “a”s and sanded “r”s supposedly signal northern Illinois. (This New Yorker’s limited ear would have pegged her as a Bostonian.) She’s withholding and Midwestern proud, but, when Lucy asks for stories of home, her mother obliges, telling tales of Amgash and its people, which she seasons with bitter humor and a dash of Schadenfreude. There’s Kathie Nicely, for instance, a wealthy woman whose dresses Lucy’s mother sewed, who ends up divorced by her husband, abandoned by her lover, and despised by her children, and Mississippi Mary, whose fate, on discovering her husband’s infidelity, is just as bleak. What Lucy’s mother doesn’t like to talk about is the Bartons. How Lucy’s father, who returned from the Second World War with post-traumatic stress disorder, flew into unstoppable panics and brutally humiliated Lucy’s brother. How Lucy’s mother herself beat the children. How Lucy, when she was very young, was locked in the family truck while her parents went to work, an ordeal that Lucy can’t address with her mother, and instead describes to us:

I cried until I could hardly breathe. Once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make. I have left the subway car I was riding in so I did not have to hear a child crying that way.

Strout’s language, deftly adapted for the stage by Rona Munro, is simple in the way of a coiled pot or a Shaker chair, a solid, unfussy construction whose elegance lies in its polished unity, and Linney, radiating warmth and lucidity, is just the right actor to bring it to life. Winding through dense tracts of script, her ninety-minute performance is a feat of subtle bravura. It’s no easy thing to play a mother in one breath and her child in another. (Ask Norman Bates.) As in Strout’s novel, there is a possibility here that Lucy has fantasized her mother’s visit, whether in the haze of her sickness or in the more productive intentional imaginings of a fiction writer; whatever the case, as Lucy goes deeper into her story, the older woman starts to fade, and Linney lets us see through Lucy’s shyness to her open heart, which has sustained her through a life of loneliness and a staid and estranging marriage. Linney’s skin seems nearly to shine, and tears roll down her cheeks, which she wipes with practical, smiling self-assurance.

Penguin Random House Audio, a producer of the play, is releasing an audiobook of the production, and that, in fact, may be the better way to experience it, because, despite Linney’s sensitivity and finesse, something is missing onstage. There is a lulling quality to the play’s narrative form, which, in the cozy darkness, can feel like a bedtime story (I couldn’t help but notice some heads drooping), and there are too many of those Amgash anecdotes, with their parade of bit characters, which at first provide an opening into the drama of the Bartons but eventually distract us from it. The problem is partly structural: Eyre and Munro have leaned heavily on Lucy’s childhood, all but erasing the novel’s thread involving literary mentorship, and certain details, such as Lucy’s enduring preoccupation with the Nazis (her father, stationed in Germany, killed two local boys at point-blank range; her husband’s German father was a prisoner of war; and, with almost apologetic gratuitousness, Lucy notes that her angelic doctor is Jewish), fail to cohere. But there is a textural mundaneness, too. On Crowley’s restricted stage, the physical action consists mainly of Linney pacing from chair to bed and back again, and Strout’s canny elisions register too often as blanks. “All life amazes me,” Lucy says, and Linney’s face lights up beautifully as she says it. That is what this production could use: more life—an escape from the antiseptic cloister of the hospital room to the rousing world outside. ♦

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout review: a light that never goes out

This is a magnificent book, one that explores much hurt and darkness without ever relinquishing its compassion or its light, says danielle mclaughlin.

Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel opens with an image of the Chrysler Building whose “geometric brilliance of lights” was visible from the narrator’s bed during a hospital stay in the mid-1980s.

The hospital stay lasted nine weeks, but the novel is structured around the five days when the narrator’s mother came to visit, sleeping each night in a chair at the foot of her daughter’s bed. Lucy hadn’t seen her mother for years before the day she turned up at the hospital “where the Chrysler Building shone outside the window”.

The Chrysler Building appears at different points in the book, always in luminous terms: shining, a “constellation”, a “beacon” of “the largest and best hopes for mankind and its aspirations and desire for beauty”. In this powerful and exquisite novel, Strout never loses sight of light or beauty, even as she explores the complex territory of a family whose traumas have become layered and compacted.

Among Strout's previously published books are Olive Kitteridge , which won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Premio Bancarella Prize, and Amy and Isabelle , which won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

My Name is Lucy Barton is longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. It is told in language that is clear, honest and direct. Several times the narrator, Lucy, makes reference to the act of "recording", rather than "writing" or "telling", and there is a sense of quiet urgency, a concentration on the accuracy of her recollections.

Strout’s prose is assured and precise as she details the narrator’s struggles with memory: her own and other people’s. Poignantly, Lucy says: “I have no memory of my mother ever kissing me. She may have kissed me though; I may be wrong.”

And on recalling her mother’s pronouncement on the ending of a neighbour’s marriage, she says: “But maybe that wasn’t what my mother said.” There is no attempt at point-scoring against her mother, only a desire to provide true and exact testimony.

The narrator describes growing up in Amgash, Illinois, a tiny rural town where, as well as being poor, the family were considered “oddities”. Until she was 11, they lived in a garage next door to a great-uncle’s house, moving into the house when he died. They had “hot water and a flush toilet” then, but it was still cold.

The house was isolated, down a dirt road amid corn and soybean fields. There was also isolation of a psychological kind: no books, newspapers or television and, at school, the narrator and her siblings were told that their family stank.

There was abuse and hardship. At the heart of the novel is the mother-daughter relationship, which Strout explores in a way that is unsentimental and unsparing and, at the same time, hugely compassionate. Here is a mother who struck her children without warning, “impulsively and vigorously”, who, when her daughter’s breasts began to develop, told her that she looked like one of the neighbour’s cows.

She is also a woman with a curious take on offering comfort; during her hospital visit she shares stories of sad and failed marriages, of ruined lives, going on to advise that her daughter, too, will have marriage trouble. But Sarah Payne, the writer whose workshop Lucy attends, declares emphatically that “this is a story about love”.

Lucy’s attempts to extract from her mother an admission of love are heartrending, as is her mother’s seeming inability to provide it, in any direct fashion at least. But, against all odds, their exchanges are, in their own way, often uplifting. Strout navigates these mother-daughter conversations in prose that is finely tuned and unerring, harnessing the power of the unsaid as well as the said. She never lets the light go out.

The novel’s main focus is the relationship between Lucy and her mother, but the reader also witnesses something of the complex relationship she has with her siblings. “We were equally friendless and equally scorned,” she says of herself and her sister Vicky, “and we eyed each other with the same suspicion with which we eyed the rest of the world.”

With regard to her brother and sister, Lucy appears to suffer something akin to survivor’s guilt; she questions what she terms her own “ruthlessness”.

“How Vicky managed, to this day I don’t know,” she says, and she sends Vicki money for things the children need or want. “I think she feels she is owed the money by me,” she says, “and I think she may be right.”

And while the narrator tells us that “this is not the story of my marriage”, there are also insights into the dynamics of her relationship with her husband, William, and her daughters Chrissie and Becka.

Strout has said, “It is not ‘good’ or ‘bad’ that interests me as a writer, but the murkiness of human experience and the consistent imperfections of our lives.”

When Lucy writes to her mother after hospital, she replies on a card showing the Chrysler Building at night. “Maybe it was the darkness with only the pale crack of light that came through the door,” Lucy says earlier in the novel, “the constellation of the magnificent Chrysler Building right beyond us, that allowed us to speak in ways we never had.”

This is a magnificent book, one that explores much hurt and darkness without ever relinquishing its compassion or its light. Danielle McLaughlin is the author of Dinosaurs on Other Planets

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