When I first started reading Elizabeth Strout's books a few years ago, I was struck by her depictions of rural Maine in the Olive Kittredge books and of Amgash, Illinois, in
My Name is Lucy Barton. Earlier posts in the on those books, in the "Literary Ruralism" series, are
here and
here.
Now I want to provide an excerpt from Strout's latest, Oh William!, a sequel to My Name is Lucy Barton. In this latest novel, Lucy Barton, a novelist, spends time with her ex-husband, William, as he experiences the disintegration of his subsequent marriage and learns that his mother had a child from her prior marriage, a daughter that his mother abandoned to marry William's father.
Lucy, the novel's narrator, and William both live in New York City. In this novel, she travels with William to Aroostook County, in far northern Maine, where his mother grew up and where his half-sister, Lois Bubar, still lives.
The depictions are thus from those parts of Maine (Bangor up to the Canadian border, essentially), as well as from Amgash, Illinois, the tiny place where Lucy grew up, which gets compared to rural Maine.
In this scene, they are arriving in rural northern Maine, having flown into the Bangor Airport.
In the parking lot, right up near to the front door of the place, we walked past a car that was filled with garbage. Every space of it-except for the driver's seat-was filled with garbage. Trash. Nothing was growing, but there was to the ceiling of the car-the car was an old sedan-trash: newspapers and old wrappings of waxed paper and small cardboard cartons of the sort that food came in. The license plate had a big V on it and also said VETERAN. (Page 110)
Veterans are a larger percentage of the population in rural America than in urban places.
While traveling in northern Maine, William suggests a comparison with Lucy's home community in Illinois.
Then William said, "Probably it reminds you of your childhood up here."
I said, "It does not remind me of my childhood. Have you seen one field of soybeans?" But then I saw that he was right. Until we had stopped at this little place for breakfast we had seen almost no one, and the isolation made me panic. (p. 112)
In the following scene, we see more on rural America as a source of military personnel, on rural America as religious, and rural America in need of economic development.
We drove through the town where the diner was, passing a sign that said Libby's Color Boutique: Carpet, Laminate, Vinyl Flooring CLOSED. As we drove out of the town we saw American flags on many telephone poles, flag after flag, and interspersed with them was an occasional black flag for a POW. We could not find the turnpike entrance for a while. We kept driving through winding roads, and by the side of the road at one point were short little cat-o'-nine-tails, also goldenrod, and a grass that almost had a pinkish tinge to its top but was otherwise brown and dry-looking. There were no other cars, or even people seen, in the middle of a day, a Wednesday in late August. But there were lots of almost-falling-down houses, and lots of stars on the sides of these houses for veterans, gold stars for the ones who were dead.
We passed by signs that said Pray for America. And cabins for United Bible Camp.
A pile of rusted-out junk cars was next to an old building that hadn't, it looked, been used in years and years, all of it standing back from the road. (p. 115).
I have often wondered about the stars one sees on the sides of houses, especially in rural America. I have speculated to myself that this is because inhabitants are Masons. In fact, Strout reveals, it is because these are the homes of veterans.
In the next scene, Lucy thinks more about how rural Maine resembles the rural Illinois community where she grew up.
That driving down this road and seeing the falling-down houses and the grass by the side of the road and no people around, I had an almost-memory of driving with my father in his truck and me in the passenger seat next to him as a very young child, the window open and my hair blowing in the wind, only the two of us-where would we have been going? But the memory was not one of the dismalness of my childhood. Instead, something in me moved deep, deep down and I felt almost-what can I say that I felt?-but it was almost a feeling of freedom as I rode alongside my father in his old red Chevy truck. As I rode now next to William I almost wanted to say, with a sweep of my hand: These are my people. But they were not. I have never had a feeling of belonging to any group of people. Yet here I was in rural Maine and what had just come to me was an understanding, I think that is the only way I can put it, of these people in their houses, these few houses we passed by. It was an odd thing, but it was real, for a few moments I felt this: that I understood where I was. And even, also, that I loved the people we did not see who inhabited the few houses and who had their trucks in the front of these houses. This is what I almost felt. This is what I felt.
But I did not tell that to William, who came from Newton, Massachusetts, and not the poor town of Amgash, Illinois, as I had, and who had lived in New York City for so many years. I had lived in New York City for years as well, but William inhabited it-his tailored suits-and I felt that I had never inhabited New York as he had. Because I never had. (p. 116)
* * *
We arrived in Houlton around noontime. The sun was shining down on big brick buildings: a courthouse, a post office. Main Street had a few shops-there was a furniture store and a dress shop-and we drove slowly through and then I saw a sign that said Pleasant Street, and I yelled, "William, we're on Pleasant Street!" I looked out the window and the houses were small and wooden, two white ones we passed. And then we passed by number 14, and it was the nicest house on the block. It was not a small house: It was three stories and freshly painted a dark blue with red trim, and it had a little garden in the front, and a hammock was in the front yard as well. William stared at it as we drove past, and then he kept driving and we pulled over on the next block up. (p. 119)
14 Pleasant Street, Houlton is the home of William's half sister.
Houlton, population about 6,000, is the county seat of Aroostook County and right on the border with Canada. It is also the northern terminus of I-95, a fact that does not figure in Strout's narrative.
Interesting that the house is so nice--much nicer than others on the street. This suggests some class stratification, even in small towns--and a variety of housing even on the same street. It becomes clear from the book that the woman who raised William's half sister--that is, Lois Bubar's step mother--was from an established, well-off family. This had been that woman's family home, passed down to Bubar.
The next bit illustrates the limited services in small towns, among other atmospherics of rural locales such as fields of crops, which Lucy is somewhat familiar with because of her rural upbringing.
We tried to have lunch in Houlton, but the one place we found closed at 2:30 and it was 2:35. "Sorry," the woman said at the door, and then she closed the door and bolted it from the inside. "Is there any other place around here?" William tried to ask through the glass, and the woman just walked away.
"Jesus," William said. "Okay, we'll eat in Fort Fairfield."
William's plan was that we would drive to Fort Fairfield to see where Lois had been on a float through the streets in her glory as Miss Potato Blossom Queen--I did not know why this was important to William--and then we would spend the night in Presque Isle--a city forty miles away from Houlton but just eleven miles from Fort Fairfield "because it interests me since Lois's husband came from there" is what William said, about Presque Isle, and we would think about what we were going to do the next day when we drove back down through Houlton before getting our plane to New York that night. I mean we would decide what to do about the woman who lived at 14 Pleasant Street, William's half-sister, Lois Bubar.
==
On our way to Fort Fairfield there was suddenly much sky, and in a small way this thrilled me, because I had grown up with sky all around me. This sky was just gorgeous with sun but also very low clouds in places like a quilt, and the sun went in and out of these clouds, lighting up the pastures of green, and we passed a huge field of sunflowers. We also passed by fields with clover as a dark cover crop for nutrients that I knew from my youth would be plowed over in spring. It was interesting to me that I felt this small happiness at an almost familiar scene, that the panic of the isolation from this morning had changed into this. I felt a happiness, is what I am saying. And it made me think again about the memory of me driving as a young child next to my father in his truck. (pp. 127-28)
* * *
We drove by two small houses that had satellite dishes. In the yard of a farmer, four long trucks stood, trucks that used to haul things; they had not been moved for years, grass was growing up all over them. (p. 129)
The next bit is about Fort Fairfield, between Houlton and Presque Isle; it is the locale of the Miss Potato Blossom Queen contest, which William's half sister, Lois Bubar, had won. It's a nice reminder of such festivals as a fixture of small-town life:
We passed a sign that said: Welcome to Friendly Fort Fairfield.
William leaned forward to peer through the windshield. "Jesus Christ," he said.
I said, "Yeah. My God."
Everything in the town was closed. There was not a car on the street, and there was a place that said Village Commons- an entire building-with a sign on it: FOR LEASE. There was a big First National Bank with pillars; it had planks nailed across its doors. Store after store had been boarded up. Only a small post office by the end of Main Street seemed open. There was a river that ran behind MainStreet.
"Lucy, what happened?"
"I have no idea." But it was a really spooky place. Not a coffee shop, not a dress store or a drugstore, there was absolutely nothing open in that town, and we drove back up Main Street again where there was not a car in sight, and then we left.
"This state is in trouble," William said, but I could see that he was shaken. I was shaken myself.
"I'm really hungry," I said. There was not even a gas station in sight.
"Let's head to Presque Isle," William said. I asked how far away it was and he said about eleven miles-but we were not on the turnpike-and I said I didn't think I could wait that long to eat. "Well, keep your eyes open and we'll stop if we see a place," he said.
We drove along for a while, and I said, "Why did you want to see Fort Fairfield so badly?"
And William didn't say anything for a moment, just kept looking through the windshield, biting on his mustache. Then he said, "I thought when I met Lois Bubar I could tell her that we had gone to Fort Fairfield to see where she had been Miss Potato Blossom Queen, that she would think it showed a real interest in her, that it would make her feel nice." (p. 133).
I looked around at the fields we were passing, and up on a small hill was a horse-drawn wagon driven by a man wearing a big hat. "Look at that," I said.
"It's the Amish," William said. "They've moved here from Pennsylvania to farm. I was reading about them."
Then we passed by a farmhouse, and on the front porch were two children. There was a small boy who also had on a big hat, and there was a small girl who wore a long dress and a small bonnet thing over her hair. They waved to us vigorously. So vigorously they waved!
"Oh, it makes me sick," I said, waving back at them.
William said, "Why? They're just doing their thing."
"Well, their thing is crazy. And the kids are forced to be a part of it." As I said this, I realized that it reminded me of my own youth, coming from the family that I came from.
* * *
William said, "And where do you suggest we find this food?" It was true that there were no places at all; we were going by trees and almost no houses, and this was the way it was for miles.
I've identified some additional rural excerpts from Oh William! that I want to share, but I'll save them for a future post.
