My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

“I believed in the voice so completely I forgot I was reading a story,” the writer Ann Patchett said in an email. It’s an experiment that works, with readers and reviewers marveling at how smoothly and urgently the voice draws them in. Strout’s best-known novels, including “Amy and Isabelle” and “Olive Kitteridge,” the indelible portrait of a stubborn, difficult, complicated woman that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. “Lucy Barton” is written in a strikingly spare first-person voice, a contrast to the knowing, sophisticated omniscience of the narrators of Ms. She ordered a spartan breakfast - a single scrambled egg and a piece of white toast - and it seemed fitting, somehow in keeping with the book.

Strout, slender, blond and sunny, was in a diner near her apartment on the Upper East Side. “I dust them up, and they do their little things, and I keep what is most truthful about them.” She discards some and keeps others, she said. She sets out her various sketches and ideas for characters on scraps of paper and lets the scraps accrue wherever she is working. “I work in all different ways, and never from beginning to end,” Ms. Instead, they come to life mysteriously, organically, in stray scenes or bits of dialogue that present themselves and then, through some mysterious process that even she finds difficult to explain, eventually coalesce into a whole. Strout said she did not use her characters as pawns to make a greater point, nor as stand-ins for her own experiences, as readers often assume that writers do.

Strout’s generous-hearted, deeply insightful novels, it is really about a great deal more: a terribly troubled past, a present that is slowly imploding, the yawning spaces between even the closest of people, our frequent inability to see what’s in front of us. But who knows which voice reflects whose view in the deceptively simple but many-layered world of “Lucy Barton”? On the surface, the story is about a woman trying to recover from an illness and make peace with her mother. She’s speaking to her own fictional audience, and possibly to us, too.

“It’s not my job,” Sarah says sharply, “to make readers know what’s a narrative voice and not the private view of the author.” Don’t make the mistake of blurring the line between fiction and truth, a novelist named Sarah Payne warns in Elizabeth Strout’s latest book, “My Name Is Lucy Barton.”

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout