It becomes an unspoken article of faith for her, and a humble spur to her curiosity. Despite powerful moments of intuition-that her son-in-law’s father has contracted the coronavirus, that her daughter is contemplating an affair-Lucy, who’s in her sixties, keeps telling herself that she knows nothing. The Shaker plainness of Strout’s prose stretches to accommodate Lucy’s bewilderment as she goes about her life’s great project: attempting to understand the people around her. It is meant to feel like life-random, surprising, occasionally lit with flashes of larger meaning-but it is art. Like all of Strout’s novels, “Lucy by the Sea” has an anecdotal surface that belies a firm underlying structure. “ Thank you,” she replies, “for getting what that book was really about.” During the fractious year to come, Lucy will find plenty of occasions to contemplate class.

“Maybe if you didn’t come from-well, from poverty,” he explains, “your mind just goes over it, and you think it’s about mothers and daughters, which it is, but it’s really, or it was to me, about trying to cross class lines in this country.” Lucy, who will soon consider this man her closest friend in Maine, where she has gone to ride out the pandemic, feels surpassingly gratified to hear this. His wife read the book, too, and thought it was “about mother-daughter stuff,” but he disagrees. In Elizabeth Strout’s “ Lucy by the Sea” (Random House), the fourth of her novels concerning a writer named Lucy Barton, the title character meets a man who tells her that he loved her memoir.

Elizabeth strout lucy barton