Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout review – a subtle collection
In My Name Is Lucy Barton, the novel that came before this collection of stories, Lucy Barton, who is just starting out as a writer, meets and is mentored by a shy novelist called Sarah Payne. Like Lucy – and like Strout herself – Payne grew up in a small town in postwar America. Lucy admires her novels because “they try to tell you something truthful … she wrote about people who worked hard and suffered and also had good things happen to them. And then,” Lucy adds, “I realised that even in her books, she was not telling exactly the truth, she was always staying away from something.”
Payne’s books, as described here, resemble nothing so much as Strout’s own. Her habit of oblique understatement has, by now, become so honed that it makes for a finely ground prose in which style is substance. It’s a writerly quality she shares with Lucy, whose narrative in My Name Is Lucy Barton is charged with meaningful silences.
The story that Lucy does not quite tell in that book is the story of a childhood that is impoverished in every way. The Bartons are “trash”. They live in a freezing garage and have so little to eat that they scavenge out of rubbish bins. Lucy’s father is a traumatised war veteran who beats his children and masturbates in public (Lucy calls this “the Thing”); her mother is a seamstress who cuts up her eldest daughter’s clothes when she cries. Lucy moves to New York and publishes a celebrated memoir, which turns out to be the book we have just read. Hers is a story of poverty and abuse, but it is also, as Payne points out, a story about survival. Has Lucy achieved redemption through writing? Yes, and no.
Anything Is Possible is also a book about ordinary people who undergo extraordinary suffering and, in some cases, manage to survive. It is just as bitten-back and as full of horrifying elisions and surprising epiphanies as its predecessor. This time Lucy is a character in a wider cast, her story just one of several that were lightly sketched in My Name Is Lucy Barton, and are now fleshed out. In “Sister”, she returns to her home town of Amgash, Illinois, while on a book tour to promote her memoir, and visits the brother and sister she left behind.
Pete lives in terrified isolation and is addicted to children’s books. Vicky – who as a child was forced by their mother to eat out of the toilet if she wasted food – is overweight and full of rage. But both are able to talk openly about the past. Brought face-to-face with what she is trying to escape, Lucy has a panic attack. The story ends on a note of downbeat grace as Pete and Vicky, having ferried their successful, panicking sibling halfway back to her hotel, drive home again in fragile solidarity. “Vicky,” says Pete, “we didn’t turn out so bad, you know.”
The other stories all make similar sideways feints at half-spoken, counterintuitive truths. Lucy’s memoir is the trigger for another quiet revelation in “Windmills”, when her childhood friend Patty Nicely (one of Strout’s carefully calibrated names) buys the book and finds her own unnameable childhood “Thing” alluded to in it: as a teenager she discovered her mother in bed with her high-school teacher. The whole of Amgash knows that the Nicelys’ marriage ended as a result of this affair, but not about Patty’s lifelong, fastidious fear of sex. “It made me feel better,” Patty decides on reading about the Barton family’s dysfunction, “it made me feel much less alone.”
What the stories all have in common is this sense of the communality of human guilt and suffering
The memoir features again in “The Sign”, where the former janitor at Lucy’s old school, Tommy Guptill – who was a well-to-do dairy farmer until his farm burned down in what Tommy has always believed was an act of God – spots it in a bookshop display. He recalls both the little girl whom he used to let shelter in the empty classrooms at the end of the school day and “the man, Ken Barton, who had been the father of those poor, sad children”, and once worked for him in his dairy. The story delivers its subtle final blow when Tommy befriends Pete out of remembered pity for Lucy, learns what really caused the fire that burned down his farm – and realises that he and the Bartons were all implicated.
What the stories in Anything Is Possible all have in common is this sense of the communality of human guilt and suffering, or what Tommy calls “this confusing contest between good and evil”, and an apprehension that “maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth”. In My Name Is Lucy Barton, Lucy reports someone speaking dismissively of Sarah Payne’s books, “saying that she was a good writer, but that she could not stop herself from a ‘softness of compassion’ that revolted him, that, he felt, weakened her work”. Unlike her alter ego’s, Strout’s compassion for her fellow creatures, as these anguished, lean stories again prove, is as keen as a whip, and all the more painful for it.
• Anything Is Possible is published by Viking. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
