Most people think of New York as a challenging place to live, but as far as the gentle, easily frightened Lucy is concerned, the Big Apple has nothing on Amgash. “I have never fully understood the whole class business in America,” Lucy observes, a blind spot she shares with much of the nation, although she blames it on coming “from the very bottom of it, and when that happens it never really leaves you”. That’s how hard it is – impossible, really – to shake off your roots. Yet the Amgash series that Oh William! belongs to is named after the small Illinois farm town where Lucy grew up in “terribly bleak poverty” with harsh and sometimes abusive parents. Returning to the city by plane in Oh William!, she looks out of the window and feels “what I have almost always felt when I have flown into New York, and that was a sense of awe and gratitude that this huge, sprawling place had taken me in”. T he most unlikely thing about Lucy Barton, previously seen in Elizabeth Strout’s novels My Name Is Lucy Barton and Anything Is Possible, is how much she loves New York, where she has lived for decades.
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