Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
“Even Freud had said, ‘We must love, or we grow ill.’ They were spelling it out for him. Every billboard, movie, magazine cover, television ad - it all spelled it out for him: We belong to the world of family and love. And you don’t.”
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Olive Kitteridge (2008) is a novel-in-stories, a concept that intrigued me from the outset. Across 13 interconnected stories, Strout weaves together the inner lives of a community living on the coast of Maine, New England. The larger-than-life thread pulling them all together is Olive Kitteridge, a retired maths teacher, wife of docile Henry the pharmacist, and mother of sullen Christopher.
If the characters in the rest of the stories are planets, Olive is the sun which they all gravitate around, keeping their respective distances and feeling the burn when they get too close. For the titular character, Olive is not a likeable one. In the several stories that focus on her and her life, we learn enough to feel repulsed by her. Argumentative, greedy, rude, blunt, and loud, Olive is not someone I’d want to be stuck in a lift with. She inserts herself into conversations and scenarios with no real care for “reading the room.” As others comment:
“Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology.”
But Strout does something rather spectacular. In the stories where Olive is not the focus, and where she makes small entries into the conversation, I began to develop a fierce protectiveness over her. Her insights and the way she approaches some of the troubling experiences presented are illuminating. When Strout shares the inner thoughts of other characters about Olive, I found myself getting defensive (rather like Olive herself would)!
In one story where another older couple in town are sheltering a young woman with anorexia after her boyfriend has left her, Olive’s presence opens the narrow situation into a broader view of human experience:
“I’m starving, too,” Olive tells her. “Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?”
“You’re not starving,” the girl replies, looking at this large woman, with her thick wrists and hands, her big lap.
“Sure I am,” Olive says. “We all are.”
When I first started reading this book, I struggled to get into the pace Strout presents, but as the chapters emerged, I found myself engrossed in unexpected ways. The stories cover a broad expanse of human experience, not least the pain, desire and loss that seems to lie at the heart of what we all go through.
In one story, a widow discovers at her husbands funeral the illicit affair he had with her cousin. A young bride is left abandoned and bereft after being jilted at the altar. A violent hostage scenario takes place at a hospital in the middle of the night. A young man sits in his car, contemplating his approaching suicide attempt. All of these stories draw out a range of reactions, some humorous, many heartbreaking. They left me with a distinct uneasiness at the ways I identified with lashing out and furthering painful experiences through cutting words.
Strout uses all of her characters to deliver little lightning bolts of insight, and these are often sad. An aged lounge pianist, having been revisited by an old lover during her set, reflects on her life:
“Angie, leaning her head now against the hallway wall, fingering her black skirt, felt that she had figured something out too late, and that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late.”
Through this structure - sliding in and out of others stories but always coming back to Olive - Strout provides us with an incredibly profound overview of the different ways people both understand (or don’t understand) each other and themselves. Olive becomes someone we cling to throughout the book as we learn of the despair across her fellow community members, purely because of the deep empathy, honesty and realism she can shed light on as she listens and shares her unsentimental views.
In so doing, Strout also provides a strong call to arms to explore our own ideas of empathy and the ways we should try to understand those around us. Even, or perhaps especially, if we don’t like them.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
