The title of Elizabeth Strout’s novel suggests that her protagonist is obsessed with naming. In fact, naming has been central to her experience  since she was a child. Her early years in school were defined by her struggle to name the words she discovered and the actions she observed in others. She was victimized by the names her classmate called her, directly or by inference.

Lucy and her mother name her nurses, preferring their own pet names to the given names of these persons who come in and out the sanctuary of the sickroom. Together they struggle to name persons whose lives somehow fill out and enlarge their shared experience. Lucy would like to name the emotion that hangs between the two women, but her mother closes her eyes and refuses to cross that line. Her pet name “Wizzle” is sufficient for all that is unsayable.

There are things that Lucy is reluctant to name. She can’t say the word “snake,” and she shies away from the “Thing” that involves her father and penetrates every page of the novel. She knows that as a writer, she has assumed the obligation of naming, and she worries about the injunction to be “ruthless.” She puzzles over the  reluctance of the writer Sarah Payne to give her name when the two first met in the New York clothing shop, but she comes to understand what it means to own words published in black and white.

Lucy came of age with parents who found it difficult to name their past as well as the present. Her father’s denial of the two young German civilians he killed in WWII when he was barely older than a boy is a failure of naming that overshadows his life and figures in his rejection of the German heritage of the man Lucy marries. That family horror lingers , leaving Lucy with an unnamed conflict over her husband’s inheritance of money from an ancestor whose profits had come from the war. Her nightmares related fears that a Nazi would imprison her and take her children.

Much is left unnamed in this novel–the breakup of Lucy’s first marriage, the relationships of her daughters with their stepmother, her rise to fame as a novelist, her choice of second partner. It is far easier for Lucy to name the cornfields of her youth and the skyline of her adulthood than it is to name her conflicted emotions over her own role as mother. She is after all her mother’s daughter.

The Chrysler Building is featured in the cover design for both the British and the American printings of Elizabeth Strout’s novel, but the designs suggest subtle differences. The British cover features the stylized window and the empty chair of the mother’s ever-illusive presence in the daughter’s life, while the American cover slices the building with the author’s name and the book’s title. The two designs reflect the tensions that exist in the protagonist’s life. Struggling to be heard or even be noticed as a child is partly resolved in the older professional who makes her mark on the publishing world. It’s another novel that studies the power of limitation to motivate success. The charm comes in the dramatic irony; the narrator never quite understands what she clearly reveals to her audience.

The bulk of the novel is set in five days during the protagonist’s nine-week stay in the hospital to overcome the mysterious aftermath of an appendectomy. The period of hospitalization is peculiarly redemptive. It becomes the occasion for the narrator to climb back into the womb and listen to the murmur of the mother’s voice. She revisits the life she knew as a child but without the isolation and silence. It’s an exercise in the revision of family history.

Hospitalization offers as much psychic healing as it offers physical healing. It’s a place of secure warmth as opposed to the cold of the garage where the family once lived, a place where her physical needs are met as opposed to the meager bread and molasses of her childhood. Visited regularly by a doctor she adores, a sort of high priest of the medical world, the patient is blessed by the rituals of caring.

While the security of the extended hospital stay allows Lucy Barton time to process the deprivations and hardships of her childhood, it also reenacts the same dissatisfactions that are woven into her past. The mother’s voice is at the same time comforting and distant. The nurses are caring but unable sit down and talk. The doctor disappears from her life when her illness ends. The depths of her neediness can never be filled by others. There will always be a psychic disconnect in her life. She is left with the task of declaring her own name.

The eponymous title sets the parameters for Elizabeth Strout’s deeply introspective novel. Like a child in first grade or a beginning language student, the protagonist, Lucy Barton, proclaims from every page her rage to be seen against a shifting landscape in which alienation is the ever-present danger. The reader meets her in the anonymity of a prolonged hospital stay. The clinical sterility of her room is illuminated at night by the lights of the Chrysler Building. That building hovers over her experience as a strangely personal image of a secular god. Its suggestion of order, beauty, and strength reaches toward the sky beyond, a silent correlative of the hidden element in her own soul that is both salve and desire.

The building acts as recurring motif throughout the novel. It’s an image of identity in an otherwise blur of buildings. It aspires to having its artistic design recognized and thus becomes a model for Lucy’s ambition to have her own fiction recognized.

The building is linguistically connected to the near-mystical presence of Lucy’s mother in the hospital room. Both mother and building seem to have mystical night powers as they intersect with the daughter’s  silence. The mother’s dreams connect with the daughter’s life providing knowledge of a birth, certainty of recovery, and a troubled marriage to come. The illumination of the building at night enables mother and daughter to transcend their habitual patterns of silence and talk of acquaintances from the past in a new freedom of conversation. The mother’s speech becomes for the daughter an engendering presence that rivals the steadfastness of the building’s image. “Maybe it was the darkness with only the pale crack of light that came through the door, the constellations of the magnificent Chrysler Building right beyond us, that allowed us to speak in ways we never had.”

The Chrysler Building “shone like the beacon it was, the largest and best hopes of mankind and its aspirations and desire for beauty” in the night for Lucy. She wanted to tell her mother how she felt about the building, but the years of shielding emotions prevented this disclosure. Yet, her intuitive mother wrote after returning home using a picture postcard of the building, a silent affirmation of the power of the building in their abbreviated five-day experience. Perhaps, though she would deny it, she caught a glimpse of what the building meant to the daughter. Uncomfortably, she saw through that shared window and knew what the carefully dressed women walking on the streets of New York meant to her youngest daughter.

Stroud’s novel is a good place to start a read through the Booker longest. It’s a short novel that can be read in a weekend or a long night. It is technically fresh while delivering philosophical depth. It probes the way culture shapes perception, personality, and the process of societal adaptation. It never whines but explores the shaping influence of economic and class differentiation.