Olive Kitteridge (2008)
Why this one?
Strout’s latest book, Tell Me Everything, is on this year’s Women’s Prize shortlist. It features numerous characters from her previous novels, including Lucy Barton, about whom I know a little having read two of the books in her series, and also Olive Kitteridge, probably her other most famous character, who I’d yet to encounter, so set out to remedy this by reading her titular origin story.
Elizabeth Strout (1956- ; active 1982- ) was born in Portland, Maine, USA. She studied law, receiving her J.D. from Syracuse College of Law, as well as spending time at Oxford in the UK. Her first short story was published by New Letters magazine in 1982, and continued to have short stories published in literary magazines. She worked briefly in law and subsequently in teaching while working on her debut novel.
Amy and Isabelle was published in 1998 and was a critical and commercial success, nominated for the 2000 Orange/Women’s Prize (won by Linda Grant’s When I Lived in Modern Times) and the Pen/Faulkner Prize as well as being dramatized for a TV movie. Her third novel, Olive Kitteridge, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was followed by a sequel Olive, Again in 2019. The first book was adapted for TV by HBO in 2014, with Frances McDormand in the title role.
In 2016 she published My Name is Lucy Barton, the first of her novels to feature her other famous heroine. It was longlisted for the 2016 Booker, and was followed quickly by Anything is Possible (2017) which features interlinked short stories set around Barton’s hometown. Oh William! (published 2021) was a more fully-fledged return to Lucy’s own story, which has already been continued in 2022’s Lucy By the Sea, set during the pandemic.
Thoughts, etc.
Olive Kitteridge is a short story cycle covering several decades in the lives of the inhabitants of a rural Maine community. One character is common throughout the collection’s stories, the indomitable Olive, a retired schoolteacher, matriarch, and pillar (of sorts) of the local community. She is central to many of the stories, an important piece of the plot in others, and entirely peripheral to a few others. It’s superficially an odd kind of assemblage, betraying in some senses its roots as a collection of short stories published by Strout over the course of the whole of the 90s and 2000s. But it does contain narrative progression, its throughline being in the development of its lead character, who in the course of the book sees her son twice married, her husband incapacitated and later passing away, and the beginnings of an unlikely later-life relationship.
I’m not going to go in for an extensive review of this one. It’s obviously been widely covered over the years and is now rightly a classic. It’s immediately apparent why its lead character has proved so popular and enduring. She’s certainly not a straightforwardly ‘likeable’ protagonist. In fact, on many levels she’s actively off-putting: blunt, often rude, domineering, and alienating even to her own close family. Some of this is also easily flipped (by Strout’s magical pen) into relatability - sometimes comically so, as when we cheer along with her latest dismissal of some dumb or foolish character who has the misfortunate to cross her; sometimes more tragically, as her chronic lack of social filter occasionally comes back to haunt her in rather sad circumstances. She’s also got a way of cutting through bullshit that is especially winning, with a brutal intolerance of meaningless cliche. At other times she betrays less forgiveable traits - violence, snobbery, and a tendency for petty mischief-making. Throughout, whether by choice or not (often not), she seems to be there when it matters, making impacts on others’ lives, for better of worse. Overall, she’s a brilliantly complex creation, leaving us waiting for her appearance even in sections with other very compelling characters.
I’m sometimes a little intolerant of short story collections trying to be seen as novels (which, at least in my copy’s blurb, this one definitely is doing). But here I think it works. The effect it gives reminded me of those music videos or adverts where a central figure remains relatively stable, almost motionless, while other people and events whizz around them at barely visible speed. Around her, so much happens, but Olive moves at her own pace - developing, for sure, but operating almost on a different timeline to those around her. From that arises both the book’s comedy, as her old-school sensibilities rub up against developing social mores, and its tragedy, as she gradually comes to find herself more and more out of synch with her community and the wider world.
Even leaving aside that central through-line, the short stories themselves are beautifully crafted vignettes. In each one, all of the ingredients of truly magical short stories are there: the subtly revealed insight, the surprising twist, and the general sparkle of a finely crafted ‘glimpse of truth’.
Score
9.5
Really excellent stuff, and I wish I had time to read more Olive (and indeed more Strout in general) before the Women’s Prize winner is announced. Alas, though, I do not. But I will surely be back for more regardless.
Next up
Tell Me Everything.
