Oh William!

Elizabeth Strout

Viking £14.99

Review by Hugh MacDonald

Why do so few men read books by women? The question is not mine but a national newspaper’s, prompted by research, published in the Guardian, that suggested male readers were unlikely to pick up a book by a female author. For example, only 21% of Margaret Atwood’s readership is male.
It is a topic with many layers but the most obvious in the light of Elizabeth Strout’s wondrous, wise and occasionally devastating novel is that much of what is profound and significant in modern literature is being overlooked by men.
Further, it is my belief that the wide plains of American literature, once the preserve of the Big Male Beast, is now a landscape ruled by women writers.
I believe the best, most intriguing, most revelatory authors in American literature of today are women. 
The 20th century saw the dominance of the Big Male Beast from Jack London, through William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Updike, James Baldwin and Philip Roth.
Today my interest is piqued whenever a novel by Don DeLillo, Paul Auster or Jonathan Franzen is published. There are, of course, others.
But to discover the essence of that odd, mesmerising and criminally flawed country of the USA, I increasingly turn to women. It is not as if there have not always been great American writers who are female: Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Elizabeth Taylor, Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison and many others.
However, the triumvirate of Strout, Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson are now making an extraordinary impact in terms of material success and in laying out the themes and factors that make or break America, or indeed form and shape a wider humanity.
It is a large claim but these are writers with prodigious gifts and powerful ambition. Robinson, particularly in her Gilead novels, takes on the subject of sin and salvation, a theme that is central to American history, in that it was born in genocide and nurtured in slavery. This has a cost that is being paid to this day.
I believe Robinson to be the best writer of this century. It is a bold, subjective and perhaps daft claim but it is made because one is always powerfully affected by her work. She does not shrink from who and what we are and this can be both sad and inspiring.
Tyler has been damned by strong praise. Her very success, her accessibility has diminished her literary credentials in a world where financial reward is seen as incompatible with authentic genius. Yet there has been no more faithful and truthful teller of the ways in which a certain stratum of society lives and dies. 
Strout, too, has enjoyed huge royalties but shares with Tyler the ability to be a chronicler of a particular type of America, populated by a particular type of person.
In Oh William!, it is difficult (impossible?) to recall a black character. Tyler, too, is not known for investigating the African American experience. There is honesty in this.
Strout aims at the universal by describing, noting and investigating the personal. 
Her two most brilliant creations – Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton – have informed five novels.

The Herald:
Oh William! Is the third Barton novel and ranks with Olive Again as the best of Strout’s work. This means it is very good, indeed.
Its kernel is a road trip (a staple conceit in American literature) that unites Lucy with her former husband. She meets the banal and the deeply spiritual. 
Her ex-husband remarks with irritation at one point: “Well, that’s the American dream. Think of all the American dreams that weren’t lived.’’
Both are materially successful but are travelling in the state of Maine, apparently the most white in the USA, which shivers with the chill of economic downturn. This is an America where main streets are empty, where homes lie crumbling and deserted, where factories lie unused, forgotten.
Lucy and her former husband, of course, can fly back to their riverside apartments in Manhatten. But both have come from poverty and its stains are indelible, its pain endures.
What Strout does is to investigate what makes a personality, what informs a life. This, of course, is merely a banal statement of part of what makes art. But Strout is never superficial. 
When she strays unnervingly towards the sort of sentiment best reserved for a fortune cookie, she suddenly drops a piece of wisdom that is felt viscerally.
Oh William! carries the traditional Strout ingredient of experience. Her characters are always credible, their flaws illuminating their humanity.
Barton and Kitteridge, for example, are sometimes brutally, sometimes subtly shown in all their human frailty. We know people like this. We are people like this.
This ability to create characters of truth extends to the male characters. Tyler (Macon Leary in Accidental Tourist), Robinson (the Reverend John Ames in Gilead) and now Strout (the husbands and ex-husbands of Barton and Kitteridge) have the gift of conjuring up men in all their vulnerability, anger, kindness and disappointment.
This gift of creating a fully authentic representation of the opposite sex has not been a hallmark of the Big Male Beast in American fiction. I remain an ardent admirer of Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Roth, for example, but their women are slight and often unconvincing.
Strout seeks something bigger than the Big Male Beast. She picks the scabs of the barely healed wounds of the past – personal and societal – and she describes the present with a touch that can sting. 
This is an America of routine, personal infidelity and free-falling economic downturn. This is a country that does not know where it is going and is fearful of where it has been.
This communality of uncertainty is felt personally. It touches all, male or female. It is just one reason why more men should read women writers. The best may be Robinson but Strout is a wonderful place to start.