The First Husband

Elizabeth Strout’s latest book, Oh William! is a slim one, more a novella than a novel. It extends the story of characters we have met before in Strout’s fiction, Lucy Barton the writer and William Gerhardt, her first husband, although Oh William! can be read as a stand-alone story.

While I was eager to read the previous short novel by Strout, Alice Again, because of my fascination with the character Olive Ketteridge from the book of the same name, Oh William! languished on my to-read pile for several months. It could have been the exclamation mark in the title that put me off. When a Covid infection stopped me in my tracks, I reached for Oh William! during my recovery, and I could not have made a better choice.

William as the kind of urbane man in his early seventies you see in New York city, distinguished-looking in a three-quarter length coat and living in an apartment building with a striped awning and a doorman. The book begins with William asking Lucy, his former wife, to meet with him. He has been troubled by night terrors. So begins a story narrated by Lucy which reveals William’s fears and joys and their origins.

Their former 20-year-old marriage means that Lucy already knows a lot about William. She punctuates her story with the title phrase, ‘Oh William!’ whenever she recognises his habits and moods. While this is done with fondness, I still found this internal exclamation of Lucy’s rather cloying.

A discovery about William’s past brings William and Lucy together again and propels them into a journey to Maine during which Lucy also discovers more about herself in the light of her actions and William’s comments. Above all, the story reinforces the idea that we never really know other people, even those closest to us.

With Strout’s characteristic skills of character development and insight into the way relationships work, Oh William! brings real reading pleasure. Its short scenes and sections and the novella length of the book also made it more manageable to read, especially after illness. In times of continuing social isolation due to winter ills, this is book to transport you into the complex personal lives, albeit fictional, of people living half a world away.

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