When Elizabeth Strout was in second grade, there was a boy, very poor, with no friends and dirt behind his ears. “Our teacher said to him, ‘You are not so hard up that you can’t afford a bar of soap,’ and he turned deep red,” the author told me. “That child has stayed with me.” The title character of her slim new novel, “My Name is Lucy Barton,” is an homage to that boy, “to these very rural [...]
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