Foreword

“Anything Is Possible” is a masterful collection of inter-related short stories by the acclaimed American novelist Elizabeth Strout.  I first encountered Ms. Strout’s work when I picked up a copy of her latest novel, “Lucy by the Sea”, at our public library two years ago. I was completely taken by that relatively short, trenchant novel about an aging writer and her ex-husband as they navigate the first year of the Covid pandemic together in a secluded, seaside cottage in rural Maine.

Intrigued by the character of Lucy Barton, I read another of Ms. Strout’s series of novels about this character. “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is a novel framed as Lucy’s memoir after she has made it big in the publishing world. It traverses the story of her childhood emotional abuse and impoverishment, and her lifelong struggle to declare herself as a fully human woman who can claim her name and her background on her own terms.

When I recently came upon Strout’s 2017 collection of short stories in the Large Print section of the library, I quickly grabbed it up. It turns out that the nine stories of “Anything Is Possible” are each about various characters in Lucy Barton’s early life and how their lives are unfolding. The stories are set against the background of the publication of “My Name Is Lucy Barton” and each of them reflects in some way on the successful writing career of a “native daughter” who had been scorned and isolated because of her family’s poverty and isolation.

When I was an undergraduate English major long ago, I developed a deep appreciation and love for the short story genre. Classic short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and others, were a mainstay in my literary diet. Reading the poignant, finely crafted short narratives of Ms. Strout has reawakened my love for this genre.

To help me remember each of the stories in “Anything Is Possible” I took some time to write a synopsis of each. I was so taken with the stories that I read them all a second time and revised my synopses. I felt to share these on my blog for anyone who might be interested. I fully realize that these synopses are pale shadows of Ms. Strout’s vibrant, nuanced prose. I heartily recommend reading the full-length originals to garner the full scope and depth of her writing.

1.“The Sign”

The first story is about Tommy Guptill and his remarkable encounter with Lucy Barton’s brother, Peter. Tommy and his wife Shirley are in their early 80’s, enjoying their retirement in a humble rural home near Lucy’s fictional hometown, Amgash, IL.

On a beautiful May morning, Tommy drives into the more prosperous town of Carlisle to buy birthday presents for his wife. He stops at the bookstore there and buys a gardening book for her, and notices Lucy Barton’s memoir, “My Name Is Lucy Barton” there. He fondly remembers Lucy from her years in the Amgash school where Tommy had worked as the janitor.

Tommy’s backstory is that he had been a successful dairy farmer, happily married with three well-adjusted kids, until an electrical fire burned down his barns and home. He was 35 years old at the time, stunned by this sudden reversal of fortune. In the midst of his terror, he feels a warm, reassuring presence that communicates the message that “all will be well”. Tommy is in awe at this unbidden manifestation of God, and is able to reconstitute a happy, productive life. He is content with his ensuing career as a janitor at the impoverished town’s only school, becoming a steady and positive presence to everyone he encounters there, teachers and students alike.

As Tommy is driving back home, he makes an unplanned stop at the dilapidated rural home of the Barton family, inhabited now only by Lucy’s older brother, Peter. Peter is a reclusive man in his 60’s whose main human contact is a weekly phone call from Lucy. Tommy had witnessed the three Barton children suffer isolation and derision at the Amgash school owing to their extreme poverty and their parents’ antisocial behavior. After seeing Lucy’s book, Tommy feels humanly called to look in on his reclusive neighbor.

Peter is initially suspicious of Tommy’s visit. After exchanging pleasantries, Peter asks that Tommy not visit again since it just makes him feel guilty. Tommy is incredulous, so Peter explains.

Peter believes that it was his own Father who had set the fire on Tommy’s property some 50 years ago. His Father had worked for Tommy for a while, but then stopped. Peter assumed that he had been let go and then set the fire as vengeance. Peter assumes that Tommy knows this and that his occasional visits are his own form of revenge in provoking Peter’s guilty feelings.

Tommy is stunned by Peter’s story. Tommy believes that it was his own negligence with his milking machines that had ignited the fire. While he understands the plausibility of Peter’s story, he has long ago come to peace with that tragedy. He assures Peter that he bears no grudge against him.

Peter adamantly defends his Father as a good and decent person who was “twisted” by the traumas he experienced during World War Two. Tommy shares how his own brother came back from that war, a much-diminished person who was eventually abandoned by his wife and children. He tries to comfort and reassure Peter, who eventually is able to accept Tommy’s positive intentions.

As Tommy is about to leave, Peter asks that he drive him down to the road where his long-deceased Mother’s business sign still stands: “SEWING AND ALTERATIONS.” Peter brings an axe with him and proceeds to vehemently destroy the wooden sign. Tommy looks on, aghast. He has the realization that it was the Mother who was the central force of abuse within the Barton family. Before Tommy drives away, he tells Peter that he will continue to look in on him, and Peter agrees to it, thanking Tommy.

Tommy is emotionally shaken by what he has witnessed. The rock-solid belief in a compassionate God that has sustained him since the fire has now begun to crack.

When he arrives home, his loving wife is sitting out front waiting for him. She sees her husband’s distress and asks him what has happened. Tommy shares what Peter has told him. He also shares with Shirley for the first time about the compassionate presence that had visited him during the fire. Now Tommy doubts that his experience was real. Shirley lovingly embraces Tommy and says that his experience was real, that nothing Peter shared invalidates it.

Tommy is able to receive his wife’s comfort and support. “You might be right” he says. And then adds “I love you.” It’s clear that the real love between Tommy and Shirley will get them through this crisis of faith.

2. “Windmills”

This story is about Patty Nicely, a high school guidance counselor, a widow in her 40’s, who has to reorient herself after a disastrous meeting with one of her students. Patty takes anti-depressant medication to help her deal with her grief at losing a loving husband. She has gained a lot of weight as a result. Patty is also the main caregiver for her elderly mother, who has lived apart from her family since having a brief affair when her three girls were teenagers.

A key factor in Patty’s reorientation is her chance encounter with the book “My Name Is Lucy Barton”. Patty knew of Lucy Barton from some minor childhood connections. Reading the book is a striking revelation to Patty of how a person growing up in abject poverty and emotional abuse could go on to become a highly successful author.

Patty’s first encounter with Lucy Barton’s 15-year-old niece in her guidance counselor office is quite upsetting to Patty. The girl is sullen and verbally abusive to her, insulting her as “Fat Patty” and as a woman who is rumored to never have had sex. Patty is deeply offended and embarrassed by this and calls the girl “a piece of filth.”

Patty is appalled by her own behavior. She calls her sister Linda (the main character in “Cracked”) for support, but Linda only affirms that the girl IS a piece of filth, and that Patty should have nothing to do with her.

In the course of a weekend, Patty has encounters with her mother, her younger friend, Angelina, and with a married man she has a strong emotional attraction to, Charlie Macauley. She is also reading the Lucy Barton “memoir” and is being deeply affected by it. Driving home from her visit with Angelina, Patty has a fundamental realization that she can overcome her own sense of shame and insufficiency, just like Lucy Barton did.

Patty has a second meeting with Lucy Barton’s young niece and sincerely apologizes to her for her behavior. The girl is taken aback by this. When Patty goes on to encourage the girl, saying she will help her go to college, the girl becomes very emotional, as she is not used to receiving such positive attention.

This dramatic turnaround in Patty’s belief in herself and her determination to do right by her poverty-stricken student is a testament to the power of literature to transform lives. In the end, Patty is even able to establish a positive, mutual connection with Charles Macauly.

The title “Windmills” derives from Patty’s appreciation of the hundreds of wind turbines in the rural areas surrounding her town. She is intrigued by how all the windmill arms seem to turn at different speeds, but that sometimes, some of them fall into a similar pattern. She takes this as an affirmation that sometimes people can relate with one another in harmony.

3. “Cracked”

Linda Peterson-Cornell is one of the three Nicely sisters, a sister of Patty in the previous story, whose family was disrupted when their mother left to have an affair and their father refused to accept his penitent wife back. The sisters reluctantly sided with their father, but all of them felt rejected by their mother’s affair. Their father has a successful business, and the sisters all go to college.

Linda had a one-year marriage after college but then had a longer marriage to a very wealthy man. Now, she feels like she would like her rich husband to “disappear” but is trapped by the luxurious home and lifestyle that he provides. Her husband Jay has a sexual fetish that includes voyeuristic observation of female houseguests. Linda plays along with Jay’s perversion, even reluctantly joining him in his voyeurism.

The story involves two other women, professional photographers, who are leading workshops in the local photography festival. Karen is the director of the festival and has brought in her friend Yvonne to assist. Yvonne is staying as a guest in the home of Linda and Jay.

Yvonne is put off by her accommodations, an ostensibly well-appointed private apartment downstairs, which has no doors. She is unaware of the hidden video cameras there that Jay uses to observe her. Yvonne stays for three nights, keeping her distance from her hosts.

On the third night, after coyly coming on to her, Jay assaults Yvonne sexually and she flees the house, terrified, with only panties and a tee shirt on. She tells her story to the police, who appear at Jay and Linda’s home to arrest Jay in the middle of the night.

Linda is in an emotional fog as all of this transpires. Jay has the town’s best lawyer and is intent on denying any wrongdoing. Linda is complicit with this yet shaken by it as well.

She runs into Karen in a convenience store the next day. Karen initially confronts Linda about her apparent complicity in the assault of Yvonne. Linda denies it, saying she knows nothing about the accusations against her husband.

Karen has recently experienced the unexpected suicide of her own husband. She realizes the duplicity of her assumption that Linda was complicit, when Karen herself was so in the dark about her own husband’s unhappiness. She apologizes to Linda.

Unjustifiably forgiven, Linda then has a bleak vision of her future life with Jay in which she continues to be complicit in his perversions. She feels utterly hopeless and empty with this fate. She recognizes the same sense of betrayal and loss she experienced when her mother left home to have her affair.

The title “Cracked” comes from a recurrent theme in Karen’s recent photographs, which all include cracked glass and other objects, as if from an earthquake. They are an out-picturing of Karen’s own shattered life after her husband’s suicide, as well as Linda’s perception of her “cracked” life.

4. “The Hit-Thumb Theory”

This is a story about Charlie Macaulay, a middle-aged veteran of the U.S. war in Vietnam. He is emotionally scarred from the combat horror he experienced, carrying a sense of guilt and repressed rage rather than any overt PTSD.

He is in a cheap hotel outside Peoria, IL, awaiting the arrival of a prostitute he has been visiting for some time. He has developed a real, human fondness for her, but feels guilt about the deceit his actions have introduced into his longtime marriage with his college sweetheart.

When “Tracey” arrives, he can tell that something is amiss with her. She had previously acknowledged her own feelings for Charlie and had refused to accept payment. But this time, she is distraught and asks for $10,000 to save her son from a drug deal gone bad. She says that her son’s life is threatened.

Their tryst is interrupted by a desperate phone call from Charlie’s wife. Charlie had been reflecting with warmth on the early days of their courtship while in college. Charlie recalls his wife’s innocence and zest for life. Now he confronts her pathetic neediness and his inability to take her seriously as a person.

Charlie desperately decides to get Tracey’s requested money, knowing it means the end of his relationship with Tracey, and also with his wife. He drives to a branch of his wife’s bank and withdraws the $10,000 for Tracey. Feeling unable to return home after such a heinous violation of his marriage, he checks into “Dottie’s BnB” for the night.

There he awaits the inevitable cascade of guilt for his action. As a boy, he had learned that the real pain of physical injury occurred some minutes after the trauma itself. This is the “hit-thumb” theory that he now realizes applies to emotional trauma as well. Checking into Dottie’s, he connects with Dottie on a human level. When he comes down to watch TV in the guest parlor, Dottie joins him, sensing that her guest is going through hard times. Charlie breaks down in tears as the emotional weight of the day comes crashing down on him.

Dottie is able to compassionately witness his pain without being put off, nor being overly involved. Charlie deeply appreciates that his suffering has been witnessed in such a way. Few words are exchanged. But both Charlie and Dottie feel that a significant human, ennobling connection has been made.

Dottie is quick to communicate that she is not available for a romantic encounter, and Charlie is happy for that. He remembers having his tears witnessed by strangers at the Vietnam Veterans’ memorial in Washington and how he felt that his grief was respected by them. He feels the same about Dottie’s witnessing his current emotional pain.

His sense of utter darkness is mitigated by that connection, and he leaves the next morning with some small hope for the value of his life.

5. “Mississippi Mary”

This story is about an elderly American divorcee living in a seaside northern Italian town with her younger Italian husband, also divorced. They have been happily in love for about 15 years, ever since they met when Mary got lost from her American tour group there.

Mary had lovingly raised five daughters back in Illinois. She grew up in poverty in Mississippi but later married a successful businessman in Illinois. Her first husband had had a romantic relationship with his secretary for many years. Even after that relationship ended, Mary never felt much affection or appreciation from him. When she met a kind, considerate Italian man who expressed warm feelings for her, Mary returned his affection and decided to start a new life with him.

All but her youngest daughter, Angelina, had come to terms with their mother’s new life and had visited her in Italy. Angelina and Mary had a very deep emotional bond, and it took Angelina many years before deciding to visit. When she finally did visit, Mary was overjoyed. But Angelina still felt hurt for being abandoned and expressed this to Mary.

Mary understood her daughter’s pain and shared in it as well, but she also communicates to Angelina that her previous life felt like it had dried up, and she still wanted to live. On the night before Angelina leaves for home, she sees her mother from afar and notices how happy she seems, sitting in the small Italian town square listening to music. When a bent over old man has difficulty crossing the street, she watches her mother lovingly go to his assistance. The old man is very grateful, and they have a big hug.

Witnessing this, Angelina understands why her mother has decided to live in a country where people are so much warmer and more expressive. She leaves the next day with a sense of acceptance that her mother has found love and happiness in her old age.

6. “Sister”

Lucy Barton has planned for her first visit “home” since her father died 16 years earlier. She will be in Chicago on a book tour and will rent a car to drive the two hours to her Illinois hometown.

Her brother Peter, a barely functional recluse, still lives in the dilapidated family home. Her sister Vicki lives in a nearby town with her husband and teenage daughter. Peter is anxious to see Lucy, who has maintained regular phone contact with him over the years. Vicki resents Lucy’s “escape” from their impoverished family when she left for college and never returned. Vicki is not planning to see her sister, even though Lucy regularly sends money and letters to Vicki.

Peter spends two weeks trying to spruce up the dark, decrepit, filthy house he lives in. When Lucy arrives on a Sunday afternoon, he is uneasy about the house’s condition, even though he has worked hard to clean it, and even bought a new carpet. Lucy is happy to see her brother and soon puts him at ease. She praises him for his recent volunteer work as a cook at a homeless shelter (made possible by his neighbor, Tommy Gupthill and his wife).

Then Vicki shows up unexpectedly. She treats Lucy with disdain. Lucy does her best to normalize things, asking Vicki about her job in a nursing home. Vicki shares that her daughter is getting a college scholarship and Lucy is overjoyed, but Vicki is much less so.

Vicki starts telling horrible stories of their toxic childhood. Lucy has spent the better part of her adult life coming to terms with the deprivations of her family life. One of Vicki’s stories about their mother’s ruthless cruelty causes Lucy to convulse into a panic attack. Vicki thinks her sister has gone “cuckoo”, while Peter is beside himself.

Finally, Lucy asks Vicki and Peter to drive her back to Chicago, taking two cars so that they can return home. Peter drives Lucy’s rental car, following Lucy and Vicki in Vicki’s car. Peter struggles to follow them, driving on unfamiliar roads (he has never gone more than a few miles from home).

Finally, Lucy has them pull off the highway as they near Chicago, saying she feels ok to drive the rental car back herself. Vicki and Peter return home in her car. Vicki shares with Peter how flabbergasted she is at Lucy’s strange behavior.

7. “Dottie’s Bed & Breakfast”

Dottie is an aging woman (60’s) who operates a small BnB in a small town in Illinois. She is happily divorced, mostly content with her independence. She is the sister of Abel Blaine (story #9) and shared her childhood poverty with him.

Dorothy has a significant role in story #4, “The Hit-Thumb Theory”, in which she soulfully befriends an overnight guest who is suffering a crisis in his marriage. In this story, she similarly befriends a woman guest of about her own age, wife of a cardiologist, who is traveling with her husband for a conference.

When the woman returns bereft to the BnB in the middle of the afternoon, Dottie makes her tea and gives hours of her time listening to the woman’s story (which includes an important interlude about Annie Appleby of the next story.) Not once during her hours-long monologue does the woman take in Dottie.

When the woman’s husband returns, he is upset that she has been sharing her time with the humble proprietor. The next morning, the woman gives Dottie the cold shoulder, embarrassed that she has shared herself so fully with this lower-class stranger.

Dottie takes an acid dislike for the woman and her husband, being all too familiar with the kind of disdainful class judgments of their kind. She expresses her disdain for them by secretly spitting in their morning jam. She also confronts them both verbally, eliciting further demeaning judgments from her guests.

8. “Snow-Blind”

Annie Appleby is the youngest of three kids growing up on a potato farm in New England. She seeks and finds relief from the shame-driven emotional poverty of her family by spending much of her childhood exploring the woods abutting the farm. There she has magically mystic experiences of the natural world.

Her rich inner life opens her to deep feelings and the capacity to express them. She takes to acting in school plays and at age 16, is “discovered” by a traveling theater company which successfully recruits her to a life in the theater. She has a highly successful career in small regional theaters.

A crisis in her farm family brings her home. Her mostly loving father’s dementia has gone out of control. He has revealed himself as a lifelong homosexual who maintained an ongoing secret relationship with a local schoolteacher. Annie had cherished her father as her protector after a childhood walk with him through the snow-covered farm fields. (Annie appears as an “offstage” character in the previous story, “Dottie’s Bed & Breakfast”).

 9. “Gift”

Abel Blaine is the “successful” brother of Dorothy (of “Dottie’s Bed & Breakfast”) and a childhood cousin of Lucy Barton. Like Lucy, he found a way out of hopeless poverty, in his case by working hard and using his creative intelligence in business. As an aging executive of his thriving air-conditioning business, he is generous, soulful, and devoted to his children and grandchildren, but is caught in a marriage gone stale with a higher-class woman who holds disdain for his humble beginnings.

Attending a pre-Christmas performance of “A Christmas Carol” with his family, things start going awry when the lights mysteriously go out in the theater. On finally reaching home after a very long day, Abel has to return to the theater to retrieve his granddaughter’s beloved stuff animal. There he encounters the semi-deranged actor who played “Scrooge” in that evening’s performance.

“Scrooge” initially taunts Abel for his middle-class uptightness, but Abel engages him in a friendly way. Abel finds the stuffed animal and is trying to leave, but Scrooge keeps engaging him, now in a more friendly way himself. Abel starts feeling intense chest pain, reliving his heart attack the year before, one that almost killed him.

Scrooge is terrified at Abel’s collapse and calls 911. As Abel is taken to the hospital in an ambulance, he experiences a pervading sense of well-being. As he approaches his death, he embraces the gift of an all-encompassing peace and love that engulfs him. He thinks to himself that “anything is possible.

John Bayerl, 5/26/2024