In a recent Economist book review, the reviewer asked a question I’ve been thinking about ever since. How soon is it too soon to write history? The book under review is 2020 by Eric Klinenberg. There’s no subtitle, but we don’t need one to understand that Klinenberg has written a history of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. What sort, we’re not sure. The anonymous reviewer fails to say much about Klinenberg’s book while considering the bigger issue. Among other things, she (or he) quotes the English historian Sir Ian Kershaw as noting that good books about the Second World War only started appearing 20 to 30 years after it had ended. Everything before then was biased by personal experience, and the authors didn’t have access to crucial information that was kept secret for many years. The reviewer is of course intimating that 2020 is a little thin, although on the whole it’s a remarkably polite bad review. 

I’ve read several books set during the pandemic recently, and The Economist’s question is worth considering, even though none of the books is a formal history. Instead, they’re the raw material of history. The first is American writer Elizabeth Strout’s novel, Lucy by the Sea. The second is a non-fiction book about living through the pandemic in Toronto by novelist Rebecca Rosenblum called These Days Are Numbered. In reading both, it’s possible to get an idea of how two writers in two different countries understood the confused beginnings of international trauma and tragedy—since Strout’s protagonist, Lucy Barton, is a famous novelist who leaves New York during the first days of the pandemic to live in an isolated seaside house in Maine. 

Maybe it’s better to say they show how two different people understood the pandemic, since both Lucy and Rebecca are cast not as sophisticated writers but as Everywoman, neither of them scientists, politicians or medicos, and both far from prescient about what is going on. Instead they muddle through. 

Telling us what?

Like many people, I first came to Elizabeth Strout’s writing through her 2008 collection of linked short stories, Olive Kitterridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Cranky Olive is a delightful character who takes over stories even when she plays a glancing part. I thought Frances McDormand was perfectly cast as Olive in the limited TV series, portraying someone whose outrage at the world is moderated by her grudging and often stubborn sympathy for people who fail to meet her standards, although she doesn’t often extend the same forgiveness to herself. 

My enjoyment made me buy another of Strout’s novels, My Name is Lucy Barton, when it came out in 2016. I took it off the shelf again after reading Lucy By the Sea, since it has the same protagonist. Strout tends to re-visit characters she’s introduced in earlier novels, much like the American writer Andrea Barrett. It’s something else I wonder about, although I won’t linger on the subject since I brought it up in a review of Barrett’s latest book, Natural History. Briefly, I know that re-using characters is saleable—the writer is feeding a loyal public—but wonder if it diminishes the work.

When I flipped through My Name is Lucy Barton, I couldn’t remember reading it. I usually have a good memory for books, even though I can never remember where I left my phone, and have to get my husband to call it. Then I remembered that I hadn’t read the novel, not beyond the first chapter or so. I’d skimmed the rest and put it aside, annoyed by a couple of things. 

First of all, Strout is like many writers in that her books are written in an increasingly spare style. The earlier works are more elaborate, with fuller descriptions. 

Olive Kitteridge: “All over the floor of the closet shoes are tossed and scattered. Olive chooses a dark, scuffed loafer that looks as though it is worn frequently; in fact, Olive has often seen Suzanne wearing these loafers—having bagged a husband Olive supposes, she can now flop around in beaten-up shoes. Bending over, scared for a moment that she won’t get up, Olive pushes the loafer down inside her handbag, and then, hoisting herself, she does get up, panting slightly, and arranges the tinfoil-wrapped package of blueberry cake so that it covers the shoe.”

My Name is Lucy Barton: “Three days later in the (doctor’s) waiting room was a woman who was terribly old, and she had a brace on her back, which was bent almost in half. She smiled from a face that had been made to look years younger. I thought she was brave. Beside me sat a young boy, perhaps in middle school, and his older sister. They may have been waiting for their mother—I don’t know who they were waiting for. But they were wealthy… I watched this boy watch the very old lady, he watched her with interest, and yet because she was so bent over, she was for him of course a different species.”

Shorter sentences, weird diction. I often like the way writing gets spare as the writer gets older, but I found the prose in this book to be mannered. 

More importantly, I didn’t believe the story. Although Lucy Barton becomes a writer married to a man who inherits “no small amount of money,” as she says, she’s brought up in extreme poverty by neglectful parents. It happens. Well, the neglect if not the inheritance. But the way Lucy’s childhood is presented reminded me of some of the short stories written about poor people by middle-class students when I taught creative writing, as I wrote in an earlier post here. The roof leaks, there’s invariably sexual abuse, all they have to eat is Cheerios (or in Lucy’s case, bread and molasses). Even the cat is scabby. When in my experience, people having problems usually try to jerry-rig leaking roofs, but can’t afford to do much; their diets can be terrible and they know it; and the cats are usually well taken care of. Not that Lucy is even permitted a cat. 

So I put the book aside and forgot that I’d done so, which is why I took a friend’s recommendation and picked up Lucy By the Sea, published by Random House. And here’s the thing. The pared-down prose remains, although it’s smoother here. There are references to Lucy’s unhappy childhood, but they’re not as melodramatic. I finally read My Name is Lucy Barton after finishing Strout’s latest book, and I still didn’t like it. But I like Lucy by the Sea, and I think that’s because Strout knows what she’s talking about and goes deep. She’s a writer who lived through the early days of the pandemic, and she’s chosen to examine the experience. 

At the start of the novel, Lucy is taken to Maine by her insistent ex-husband William, the father of her two daughters. We first meet all four of them in My Name is Lucy Barton. William is a parasitologist, meaning that he quickly recognizes the danger of the new disease that Lucy has barely registered. He finds the house in Maine while urging their two grown daughters to flee New York with their partners. One couple does, the other doesn’t, and soon they’re all locked down and working from home. William has recently separated from his third wife and their young daughter. Lucy’s second husband, a cellist, has died a year before. 

Throughout, Strout scatters descriptions of life in the early days of the pandemic.

“(W)hen we stepped into the train station, I was astonished. There was a sense of a war having occurred. One that was not yet over. The lights were very low. And every single station in the shop was closed except for a doughnut place that was only selling coffee, and the woman who was selling it had her little girl next to her sitting on a wooden crate; the schools were still closed. “William,” I whispered. “I know,” he said.

“A policeman stood watch.”

Yet in the middle of this, there’s no flashing-lights emergency, no overt drama, at least none that Lucy suffers. Friends and relatives die offstage. Marriages come under strain. Relationships are mended, too. But Strout has an overall point to explore, and I suppose I should issue a spoiler alert. As she gradually comes to realize what’s happening (the way we all gradually came to realize what was happening), Lucy understands that the pandemic is not an abrupt change from modern life, but an intensification of it. 

“I went outside and sat on the stoop of the place I as staying in. I sat there thinking about the girls and William, and (her second husband) David—how gone he was—and how we would all be gone someday. It was not that I was sad as I thought this, I just understood it to be true.

“And then this thought went through my mind:

“We are all in lockdown, all the time. We just don’t know it, that’s all.

“But we do the best we can. Most of us are just trying to get through.”

I read Lucy by the Sea with a kind of double focus. On the one hand, I was just reading it. On the other, as I read both Strout’s book and Rebecca Rosenblum’s non-fiction take on the pandemic, I thought about an academic reading these books sometime in the future while researching a history of Covid 19. Raw material, as I said.

In the end, not only did I enjoy Strout’s book, I also felt the future historian would find it useful. This book is valuable not just for the description of a train station under lockdown, but because of Strout’s exploration of the fact that everything was different, but it also wasn’t. When I read books of history, I sometimes find a historian saying, Then everything changed. I didn’t find the pandemic to be like that. Some things changed, big things, and they often changed in unpredictable ways. I don’t think that when this all started, anyone predicted the current resurgence of measles after parents began refusing to vaccinate their children. But other things remain the same, including the fact we’re all just trying to get through, the way we always have.

Next: These Days Are Numbered by Rebecca Rosenblum.

Lesley Krueger’s latest novel, Far Creek Road, is set during a previous worldwide emergency, the Cuban Missile Crisis. You can get it here.