There they are, together, yet they don’t entirely see each other, or know each other too well. The assumption of an indelible bond between mother and child is also disputed by the characters’ positions to one another and to the reader. Her position right outside the reader’s grasp establishes her as a placid, archetypal protector, in great contrast to the anger and instability she displays in the stories Lucy shares about the past. We do learn a few things about her: She’s stoic, a seamstress, a gossip horse with a chip on her shoulder. She never gets a name and is more cipher than round character. Into this affection vacuum, Lucy’s mother is dropped. She describes her worst experiences with the detail and distance one might use to report the week’s stock-market fluctuations: Down early, up to close the week, it does what it will. (Her husband, afraid of hospitals and generally selfish, refuses to visit her.) There, her physical loneliness reflects the emotional detachment she feels in daily life. She was disowned by her family after a marriage they disapproved of, and during most of the novel, she is in the hospital, recovering from an appendectomy. She’s needy for love, and she never laughs at parties because she rarely gets the jokes. Like Olive Kitteridge, Lucy is vaguely unlikable in such a way that her likability becomes unimportant. Lucy is in this tradition, not for any great moral transgression, but for the general darkness of her demeanor. You talk back to them, criticize them, and come to see something a little unstable in the very act of narrating a life. These narrators make what’s “real” a side concern instead, something hums and buzzes in their words, pushing you toward figuring them out on their terms. First-person narrators often seduce readers into the worldview of a person who would be repugnant if they were real (think Lolita’s Humbert Humbert Shirley Jackson’s strange confection Merricat and Alexander Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint). For all the plot devices that Strout uses, the novel’s successes rest on Lucy’s voice.

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