46 pages • 1 hour read
Elizabeth StroutOh, William
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 87-167Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 87-105 Summary
Lucy recalls that Catherine organized her and William’s vacations during the early part of their marriage and that she even accompanied them. Lucy found these vacations torturous, as she was uncertain of how to behave on them. Once, she called her family home and confided her despondency to her father. He suggested looking at the scenery.
Lucy meets her daughters at Bloomingdales, and they express their pleasure in her accompanying their father to Maine. Chrissy, who has not become pregnant after her miscarriage, says she will go to a specialist. Lucy is reluctant to pry, as she comes from a Puritan household, where such matters were never discussed. Nevertheless, Lucy reveals that her father’s post-traumatic-stress disorder, caused by WWII, produced “sexual urges in him almost constantly” (93). She breaks off before detailing how these manifested, emphasizing that she loved her father.
Lucy reflects how William is disturbed by his father’s fighting on the Nazis’ side, despite knowing that his father regretted his country’s deeds. Although William’s night-terrors have featured gas-chambers and crematoriums, he also accepted his inherited money from Wilhelm’s father, who got rich from the war. Before her death, Catherine described these funds as “dirty money,” indicating that William should “give it all away” (95). However, William kept the money and became rich. Although William was scarred by the loss of his father, Lucy considers that Catherine’s death had a profounder impact, as it was after this that William began the affairs.
Lucy only mentions William’s affair with Joanne to her daughters when Chrissy asks about whether her father had been unfaithful. However, she reveals that she also had a relationship with a married man after she left William. While Lucy is shaken by the conversation, the girls seem fine.
Lucy and William take the plane trip to Maine. They stay in separate rooms in a freezing-cold hotel. The next day, they will go to Houlton and drive past Lois Bubar’s house. At the hotel, there is a picture of William’s half-sister as Miss Potato Blossom Queen in 1961.
Pages 105-120 Summary
Lucy dreams of a man she nicknames Park Avenue Robbie. She met Robbie at the New School after her separation from William and soon after her father’s death, when she began a course on WWII to understand the battles that traumatized her father. Robbie reminds her of her father and although he frightens her with his post-coital exclamation “I’m shooting into Mommy!” (106), Lucy continues to see him for three months.
The next day, Lucy and William hit the road and she imagines them as the fairytale characters Hansel and Gretel, out on an adventure. However, the unpopulated and derelict state of the landscape disturbs Lucy. At a diner, she confesses to William that she is panicking, and he suggests that the place reminds her of her childhood. Lucy snaps at him for his inability to respond compassionately and insults the shortness of his pants. William laughs and things feel okay between them.
Lucy has never felt a sense of belonging to any group of people, but as they get back on the road she feels “an understanding […] of these people in their houses” who like her, have grown up in rural poverty (117).
They arrive in Lois’s town, Houlton, at noon and pass by her large, well-kept house on 14 Pleasant Street. They sit outside in the car for a few minutes until Lucy suggests moving on to the library.
Pages 120-139 Summary
At the Houlton Library, a woman called Phyllis shows them photographs of the German POWS who were sent to the town. William’s father Wilhelm stands out for his dark eyes and look of authority. Lucy realizes why Catherine fell in love with Wilhelm and recalls that she fell for a similar trait in William himself. The books Lucy authored are in the library and Phyllis asks her to sign them.
Phyllis’s husband Ralph takes Lucy and William on a tour of what is left of the POW barracks. As Ralph speaks, Lucy has the strange sense that “right before a word came from his mouth, I knew what that word would be” (124). Lucy is having visions, a trait she inherited from her mother. Lucy’s mother was able to visualize hidden sickness, in addition to information she had not been told, such as Chrissy’s birth.
William wants to drive through Fort Fairfield, the place where his half-sister Lois was crowned Miss Potato Blossom Queen. He hopes that this will better enable him to connect with her if they decide to meet. They drive off in search of a lunch place, through towns that look abandoned and derelict. Lucy, however, feels at home with the acres of sky around Fort Fairfield because it reminds her of the feeling of freedom she experienced riding alongside her father in his truck.
William wishes he had talked more to his father, who died when William was just 14. When William’s father told him he was in the Hitler Youth, William did not know how to respond, and Catherine did not provide more information either. William is also melancholy on the trip because he recalls that Richard Baxter, a more successful parasitologist, was from Maine. He compares himself to Baxter and decides that his career is finished.
On the road, Lucy and William perform their customary ritual of apologizing for what went wrong in their marriage. Lucy recalls an inequality in the moments when they asked each other not to leave. Lucy did not want William to leave because he was singular to her, whereas he did not want her to leave because he was afraid of being alone.
Pages 139-152 Summary
William and Lucy arrive at Presque Isle, a place William wants to visit because Lois Bubar’s husband is from there. William is annoyed that Lucy has not remembered this detail and stalks off to his hotel room.
Meanwhile, Lucy recalls that she was the one who presided over Catherine’s sickbed when she was diagnosed with terminal illness. The illness progressed rapidly, but when Lucy tried to comfort Catherine by stating that her pain would be over soon, Catherine called Lucy a “piece of trash” and demanded that she leave (145). After, Lucy cried more than she ever had in her life.
Lucy knocks on William’s hotel room door and suggests they get something to eat. He accuses her of being insensitive and self-absorbed in her response to the topic of Richard Baxter, the competing parasitologist. Lucy experiences the charge “with a physical pain, like a tiny nail had been pushed into my chest” (147). She recalls the time after she and William split up and Chrissy, who was then in college, developed anorexia. Lucy felt guilty about the eating disorder and felt so helpless that she got down on her knees and prayed. They got a therapist for Chrissy and she recovered, but one woman told Lucy that her prayer might have helped.
Pages 152-167 Summary
William comes to Lucy’s hotel room to make amends. When she brings up the subject of choosing to leave him and that leading to Chrissy’s sickness, William questions whether anyone can ever choose anything. They go downstairs and eat, and afterwards watch the news together. William says perhaps he should not bother visiting Lois, especially now that they are both so old. Lucy encourages him to postpone the decision until the next day.
William recalls the difficulties in his relationship with his mother. When he was an infant and she was not working, she put him in nursery school a year early. He was terrified and sought consolation in the arms of the teacher. Catherine shamed him for this. However, when he was an adolescent and Catherine recently widowed, she was very needy. Now, he attributes her depression to leaving behind baby Lois. Lucy sees the pain in William’s face as he relates this. He gives her a hug and they say goodnight.
Lucy is unable to sleep and recalls the time after Catherine’s death when she was on a family holiday in Florida and thought about ending her own life. She also remembers the times in her own childhood when her mother threatened to end her own life.
The next morning, at breakfast, Lucy asks whether William ever had an affair during his marriage to Estelle. He replies that he only fooled around with Pam Carlson, the woman at his 70th birthday party and that was a continuation of the affair he had with Pam during his marriage to Joanne. Lucy senses that it was not her fault that William had affairs, but rather something to do with him.
As they set off back to Houlton, Lucy tells William that she knows Catherine had trouble sleeping and had to be medicated with pills.
Pages 87-167 Analysis
The main narrative in the middle part of the novel shows Lucy and William in Maine prior to their meeting with William’s half-sister Lois Bubar. As they drive past Lois’s house and investigate German Prisoners of War in the local library, Strout fleshes out the characters of Catherine, Wilhelm, and Lois and the intended meeting becomes fraught with the potential of confronting a complicated past. William’s delaying of the meeting until he has done less important things, such as seeing Presque Isle, indicates his fears about it.
Lucy’s reactions to the unpopulated, derelict state of Maine’s rural towns make the trip important for her, as well as for William. She is reminded of both the charming and oppressive facets of growing up in a tiny house in Illinois, surrounded by soybean fields. The sense of isolation that she could not escape in her harsh childhood returns, but Lucy is also exhilarated by the open skies that remind her of riding alongside her father in his truck. Her mixed feelings about the Maine landscape echo her mixed feelings about her father, a man who returned from WWII “very, very damaged by it” in a manner that caused him to have constant sexual urges (93). Lucy narrates this in an elliptical way, saying: “often he walked around the house- I am not going to say anything more about this. But I loved him, my father. I did” (93). She allows the reader to contemplate how her father’s sexual urges manifested, censoring herself to protect both herself and him. Her love for her father regardless is both human and exemplary of the narrative’s compassion for human weakness.
William is also haunted by Maine, a land of veterans from more recent wars, including Vietnam and Iraq. He feels deep guilt about his father’s role in human suffering as a former Nazi, exemplified by an earlier trip with Lucy to concentration camps in Germany. At the same time, he was reluctant to discuss the war with his father when he was alive and also profited from it through an inheritance from his grandfather. Strout’s insistence on showing a moral world beyond good and evil is evident in her discussion of the photograph of William’s father in the local library. Wilhelm stands out amongst the POWS for his look of authority. Lucy feels that “I understood immediately why Catherine had fallen in love with him. It was not just his looks, but the way he looked, as though he would do what he was told but no one would ever have his soul” (132). Lucy realizes that the same mix of control and disdain is what attracted her to William and contemplates that “we crave that sense of authority. Of believing that in the presence of this person we are safe” (132). The authority that Lucy describes relates to old-fashioned patriarchal ideas of masculinity and it sets up an expectation of constancy in a changing world. However, the term authority could also be dangerous when applied to a former Nazi, or a white man like William who has held the balance of power at the expense of others.
William’s own relationship to authority emerges in another way on the journey as he spins a story of a rival parasitologist coming from the town they are passing. He expresses his male privilege when he discusses not reaching the same career heights as Baxter and thinks that the world and especially Lucy owe him consolation for all that has gone wrong in his life. Strout underlines this sense of gender inequality and undue pressure on women to be nurturers by revealing that Lucy was the one to nurse Catherine on her deathbed and also solely blamed for Chrissy’s anorexia. Throughout these chapters, Strout complicates her characters’ backstories to investigate the many conflicting influences on their identities and to prepare the reader for Lucy’s journey to deeper self-knowledge by way of William’s own identity crisis.
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