Lucy Barton returns — and reconnects with an old love — in 'Oh William!'
Lucy Barton — the redoubtable memoirist we've met in two previous novels — returns in Elizabeth Strout's Oh William!, reconnecting with her estranged first husband after her second husband dies.
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 Lucy, now 64, is mourning the death of her beloved second husband, a cellist named David Abramson. She
