Contributed by Deb
A summary composed without many notes is not the best way to fully capture the evening’s drift, so my take on our discussion of ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, is supplemented by a complete review by Jennifer Senior.
but here goes: deb’s take, additions, re-directions welcome! . . . In the 9-part novel ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, Elizabeth Strout enlarges the fictional memoir of Lucy Barton, returning to the cast of Lucy’s childhood, back in small-town Illinois, where soy and corn are as basic as knowing your neighbors’ business, or at least an angle on it. All six of us at Sandy’s table found much to admire in the telling & tale. From the start, in the first chapter/story, son Pete describes his father as a “decent” man while acknowledging the awful things he’s done—after the war, aware he “couldn’t live inside himself.” This sense of decency is shown throughout: the way Lucy’s sibs rise to their sister’s request to drive her to Chicago when she has a panic attack, or how Charley MaCauley pays “Tracy” the $10,000 she requests to meet her son’s drug debt, how Patty comes round to help Lila get funding for college, or Tommy Guphill looks out for Lucy.
We seemed to agree that reading the first book of the set, My Name is Lucy Barton, isn’t necessary, though together the pair reinforce the premise that no one has the whole story, & that successful Lucy, who got out of Amgash with her writing, isn’t really telling the whole story in her memoir. This partner book, Anything employs a range of characters we’ve met but delves deeper, addressing omissions that Lucy perhaps needed to reframe for herself as she made her escape from poverty & the confines of her family and home town. Here in Anything, shame partners with decency to create many a grim, troubling scene. Neighbors reliably misunderstand (often not knowing the whole story), showing us how small touches make or break folks with guilt & shame functioning as primary gut feelings. We also see how war & trauma carry their impact forward, with devastating impact on the next generations. This creates a strong anti-war undertone (not much discussed!). To me, Strout’s achievement seems a perfect sequel to Saunders Bardo, inventive in its approach, attentive to unspeakable pain & the power of small town relations—dead or alive. The writers compassionate views of “others” helps them become family/kin/pals in the fleshing out process. In both books, Saunder’s wise observation about the way death, loss & illness tenderize is fully born out. Another strong Strout!
And now, a full review: Strout’s Lovely New Novel Is a Requiem for Small-Town Pain, By JENNIFER SENIOR https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/ ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE, Elizabeth Strout, 254 p.
Anyone who’s ever experienced depression, even the tiniest mote, knows that there’s great power in relief. Certainly Olive Kitteridge, the protagonist of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, knew this. “Pleasure is the absence of pain,” Olive thought to herself at one point, recalling the words of a philosopher she’d read in college. (She couldn’t remember who. Epicurus.) She may as well have been speaking for any of Strout’s characters. The things they carry are heavy. Not to suffer would be more than enough.
And oh, how the characters suffer in Strout’s latest novel, “Anything Is Possible”! The title seems a mean joke, given the book’s army of hurting men and women, desperate for liberation from their wounds.
To describe the plot, to the extent that there even is one, is pointless. Like “Olive Kitteridge,” “Anything Is Possible” is really a necklace of short stories about people in a small town, studded with clues about who’s connected to whom. (Strout was born to be an omniscient narrator, born to flit and swoop from one crooked perch to the next.)
It is most useful to think about Strout’s work thematically. The same ideas continually preoccupy her, and her characters often behave in similar ways. They indulge in the petty comforts of gossip, their judgments disguised as concern, their desperation to reassure themselves of their luck — and virtue — disguised as pity. They throb with loneliness and fume with disappointment. (A lot of her characters are old, very old, and are bitter to discover where they have ended up.) Grown children defend parents who had done the indefensible, their mercy almost saintly in its bounty; or they do its opposite, clinging to righteous fury over parental infractions on a more human scale, driving their mothers wild with grief and remorse.
And many characters walk around with great satchels of unexpressed love.
“Because he was Charlie and not someone else,” Strout writes of Charlie Macauley, a damaged Vietnam veteran, “he could not say to his son: You are decent and strong, and none of this has anything to do with me; but you came through it, that childhood that wasn’t all roses, and I’m proud of you, I’m amazed by you.”
Where this book sharply departs from Strout’s previous work is in its frank, unapologetic emphasis on forbidden desire. Not a chapter spins by, practically, without the unveiling of some sexual secret. There are stories of voyeurism. Prostitution. A father’s secret gay life. We discover, to our horror, that the husband of one of the most tender, largehearted characters, Patty Nicely, was repeatedly raped as a child. When she was a child, Patty herself walked in on her mother in flagrante delicto — with Patty’s Spanish teacher, who was spanking her.
“Her mother could not stop herself from wailing,” Strout writes, “this is what Patty saw, her mother’s breasts and her mother’s eyes looking at her — yet unable to stop what was coming from her mouth.”
The trauma of the primal scene, which may or may not involve both parents, is central in “Anything Is Possible.” It misshapes the psychosexual futures of many innocents. The best they can hope for in adulthood is not to recapitulate the crimes that were done to them.
So where, you might ask, is the relief in such a book?
“Anything Is Possible” is certainly more grim than Strout’s previous work. It’s more audacious, too, & more merciless, daring you to walk away. “Little House on the Prairie” assumes a mythic status among some of its characters. This book is its terrible opposite. No chirping families to be found among the swaying golden fields here.
But the writing is wrenchingly lovely. It almost always is with Strout, whether she’s knitting metaphors or summarizing, with agonizing economy, whole episodes of a life: “Having met in their late thirties, they’d had only eight years together. No children. Patty had never known a better man.”
You read Strout, really, for the same reason you listen to a requiem: to experience the beauty in sadness.
For those who have read Strout’s previous novel, “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” this book also offers the pleasures of intertextual sport. “Anything Is Possible” takes place in Amgash, Ill., the town of Lucy’s birth. Though readers never actually went there — we only heard tales of it from Lucy’s mother, who prattled on about its beleaguered residents during a hospital visit with Lucy in New York — this new novel still feels like a home-coming of sorts, with familiar-sounding characters now earning chapters of their own. Like the “Pretty Nicely Girls,” whose mother’s affair liquidated the family. And Charlie Macauley, whose experience in Vietnam liquidated his soul. And of course, the Bartons.
The meta conceit of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” which the reader only realizes partway in, is that the novel is meant to be the actual “published” memoir of Lucy, its author-narrator. “Anything Is Possible” is sly, too. Characters in the town of Amgash purchase Lucy’s book at the local bookstore; they quote from it; they make note of its cover (which looks like the real-life cover of “My Name Is Lucy Barton”).
But the most startling thing the reader discovers in this book is that “Lucy Barton” wasn’t the whole truth. You may think, having read it, that you know the Barton family. Trust me: You don’t. Those children suffered cruelty of an astounding magnitude, far worse than Strout originally conveyed. That their father couldn’t stop diddling himself in their presence, and on the job, is only the half of it. It was their mother who inflicted the most harm. Lucy was holding out on us — possibly willfully, or possibly because the complete truth, half-glimpsed, was all her adult self could tolerate.
But her siblings have fuller memories. Her sister in particular can cite chapter and verse of her mother’s crimes. “You want truthful sentences?” she asks in the new novel, after a noisome litany of them rolls off her tongue. “Write about that.”
“I don’t want to write that story,” Lucy replies.
“And who’d want to read it?” asks her brother.
We would. And we do.
Follow Jennifer Senior on Twitter: @jenseniorny A version of this review appears in print on April 27, 2017 with the headline: A Requiem For Pain And Secrets.
Eugene Bookies 