My Goodreads and Amazon review of Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout (Rating 5) – A Spirit Who Steals People’s Hearts. Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout is nominally a short road trip that takes readers on a long journey. Ex-spouses but still good friends, Lucy Barton and William Gerhardt travel to Maine where he hopes to learn more about his late mother’s past. Lucy is grieving the loss of her beloved second husband, while William has had several head-spinning shocks of his own (which I’ll leave for the reader to discover). In their loneliness and sense of dislocation, they join for platonic companionship and comfort, a risky demand at best. Strout excavates the relationship between two people who know each other well, although not as fully as they believe. They fall into old patterns that get disrupted by new discoveries, about each other, and most important, about themselves. While William often remains hidden, guarded with others and not wholly trusted by readers, Lucy is open, honest, and thoroughly likeable. As William says to her, “You are a spirit. There has never been anyone in the world like you. You steal people’s hearts, Lucy.” He speaks the truth. However much William has gotten wrong in his life, in this he is correct. As a fiction writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I’m awed by the range of emotions that Strout expresses with the word “Oh.” She uses these two letters to convey deep sympathy, sharp pain, a dull ache, nudging insight, and utter surprise. From the book’s title to its final page, Strout deftly deploys deceptively simple language to bring readers another rich chapter in the life of the resilient Lucy Barton.
