A Softness of Compassion 
 At one point in this deceptively unassuming little novel, Lucy Barton, an aspiring writer herself, gets talking to a woman in a clothing store. Shyly, the woman gives her name, Sarah Payne. Lucy realizes that she is a novelist, whose books she has read and enjoyed. She recalls a friend criticizing Payne's writing for a "softness of compassion," seeing it as a weakness. Though for her part, Lucy has always liked her because "...she wrote about people who worked hard and suffered and also had good things happen to them. And then I realized that, even in her books, she was not telling exactly the truth, she was staying away from something. Why, she could barely say her name! And I felt I understood that too." 
 This encounter proves important to Lucy, who later enrolls in a workshop with the author, and begins setting down the memories that open this book as a kind of homage to her. After the edgy intricacy of the intertwined stories in her Pulitzer prizewinning 
 Olive Kitteridge 
 and the ambitious plotting of The Burgess Boys, this is unusually simple writing from Elizabeth Strout, so much so that you almost forget you are in the hands of a prizewinning author. It is very clear that the qualities that Lucy sees in Sarah Payne also inform her own writing, especially that "softness of compassion." 
 Most of the book, which is told with the hindsight of two decades, takes place in a New York hospital where Lucy, the mother of two young children, is hospitalized for nine weeks as the result of an appendectomy gone wrong. Her mother comes to visit from rural Illinois, and the two women share memories. From the very first page, I could hardly bear to close the book. Not that anything much was happening; I simply wanted to linger with this woman, listen to her voice, and see the world through her eyes. Here is an entire short chapter: 
 The doctor, who wore his sadness with such loveliness, had come to check on me the night before. "I had a patient on another floor," he said. "Let me see how you are doing." And he swished the curtain around me as he always did. He didn't take my temperature with a thermometer, but held his hand to my forehead, and then took my pulse with his fingers to my wrist. "Okay, then," he said, "Sleep well." He made a fist and kissed it, then held it in the air as he unswished the curtain and left the room. For many years, I loved this man. But I have already said that.I can imagine readers who look for more action in their novels coming out with the Reagan-era slogan, "Where's the beef?" But the savor of this almost evanescent novella is in the delicate broth; it is certainly not a hearty stew, let alone a slab of steak. Only gradually do you realize that Lucy herself, as she said of Sarah Payne, is "staying away from something." You begin to catch glimpses of what it might be: something buried in her childhood of abject rural poverty, something that made her want to plead with strangers in the town: "please, please, can you please get me out of there, bad things are going on!" You wait for the shoe to drop, the buried secrets to come out in the open. But that's the wonderful thing: most don't, at least not explicitly. You learn of estrangements and sorrows, the power of love and yet the failure to admit to it. You move forward with Lucy as her children grow up and her life changes. You get a chilling glimpse of New York at the peak of the AIDS epidemic. But you also become more and more aware of that softness of compassion in Lucy herself, her understanding that no one can ever be completely understood, and her ability to forgive. Right down to the last line of all: 
 All life amazes me.