Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteredge"

Read: July 22, 2011

I came across this book in this excellent bookstore in Wayland Square - the kind of bookstore that, instead of a table devoted entirely to tables with "As seen at the movies" or "Like Twilight? Try these!" themes has tables devoted to "Booker Prize nominees" or "Pulitzer Prize winners." The rare gem of a bookstore that is a real danger to the purse, because most on the shelves have books that you have been looking for or, and here's the danger, books that you desperately want to read and didn't even know you were searching for. Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer for fiction in 2009 and therefore resided in the Pulitzer Prize display at Books on the Square. That, combined with the fact that I had met Elizabeth Strout when she came to talk about Abide with Me to Mr. Bush's high school literary club, helped me overcome my general dislike of short story collections and compelled me to buy it.

It's taken me some time to get to this book review (about a month) because I am still uncertain about what I'd like to say. To start with, this is one of the most integrated short story collections I've encountered. The stories follow the lives of people in a small town in Maine, but the focal point is one of the residents, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher. The stories jump around in time a little, but in general it follows Olive's later life. As a focal point, Olive is both engaging and problematic. In the stories that focus on her point of view, or her husband's, you see Olive as a somewhat bitter, often mean, woman who takes her husband for granted and coddles her adult son. When she interacts with the people in her town, however, she is perceptive and patient, helping them through their crises with a refreshing no-nonsense generosity. Strout's carefully constructed character seamlessly balances Olive's acerbity so that she's a character who, on one hand, can see through social niceties to a deeper truth of an interpersonal interaction while at the same time residing in blindness or outright denial about the people who are closest to her. Olive's husband, Henry, is a kindly pharmacist who always has a nice word for everybody, which irks Olive; his gentility seems at extreme odds to Olive's asperity.

The collection as a whole has an incredibly true-to-life mimetic quality. For me, the elements of postmodernism represented a challenge. There's no clear narrative arc, characters pass in and out of the tale, and to the end I can't decide whether I like Olive or not. As the incredibly well-rounded character that she is, though, I can only imagine her dismissing those kinds of thoughts, as if to say "What do I care whether you like me or not?"