Oh William: A Novel, Elizabeth Strout, author; Kimberly Farr, narrator
This is a tenderly told story of Lucy Barton’s relationship with her first husband William. Lucy Barton loved William; he made her feel safe. However, after two decades, she left him. William had been unfaithful. When he remarried, Lucy and William remained very good friends, even after she remarried David. She always maintained strong feelings for William, through all the years they were separated, and their friendship seemed to endure. Their common children enjoyed the company of William’s new, much younger wife, Estelle, and their young daughter, as well. They even traveled together.
When Estelle left William and Lucy’s second husband died, within a short time of each other, William was a great source of comfort to Lucy, and she was, as in turn, a comfort to him. This was not always his strong point, however, especially when they were married. Lucy had truly loved David, had in fact pursued him and initiated their relationship, and it was David who was her comfort, as William had once been her source of strength and security.
When William discovered secrets about his family, both Lucy and William embarked on a trip down memory lane to try and find out more about William’s past. His father had been a German POW during WWII and had worked for an American farmer. He had married his daughter. She was William's mother, but she had not been a very good one, although she professed deep love for him. When his father died, she was very sad and they fought all the time. She was not a hands-on mother and he felt rejected, which indeed, he was, by mother, wives and newly found sister. When William discovered, at the age of 70, that he had a sister, Lois, he never knew about, he wanted to find her. She had truly been abandoned by his mother, but she had known about William and resented him.
Lucy thought that William had symbolically married his mother, when he married her, because she felt she had some of the same dysfunctional, negative qualities of his mother’s personality. She wondered, did she, too, marry her mother, a mother with whom she had made peace, in the end? Both William and Lucy had had such troubled childhoods, perhaps that was what drew them together to begin with. Brought up without the attention or affection that most children crave and thrive with, they still managed to survive, but they carried the scars of their pasts with them into adulthood.
Lucy values her relationships, her marriages, her children and her life, even those from her past who influenced her. William truly valued only one person, a person who had shown him great but short-lived kindness, at school, when he was very young. Lucy and William remained loyal to each other and were kinder to each other in their old age than they were when they were younger. They seemed more tolerant and more compassionate, better able to accept the shortcomings of each other and of those with whom they interacted.
The novel tells the story of this deep relationship between Lucy and William and attempts to explain the different direction in which each of their lives traveled as they moved apart and then together again. It is touching and sweet, and so simply told, as Lucy describes how she deals with other people, even those who slighted her. She thought of others reactions and reacted to them accordingly. She will make you wonder if one every truly really knows or understands someone else completely, not only strangers you become involved with but even someone with whom you share a life or have deep affection for, like your own children, as well.
In the end, when William shaves his moustache, the reader may be reminded of the legend of Samson and Delilah, but in this instance, Delilah is a good influence, not a tragic one, she gives strength and does not rob it. Lucy no longer needs William for his strength, but William needs Lucy a bit for hers. They both grow more enlightened about the world and what they need to take from it. Their relationship was one of loyalty and continued devotion, long after they were separated. It made a better environment for all of them. They were all different, some needed to live sparingly, some with excess, but all treated each other with respect, in the end. It is simply a very nice story.