Since Elizabeth Strout burst on the literary scene in 1998
with the novel “Amy and Isabelle” she has been revealing less than attractive truths
about small town America in extremely attractive prose. Her fictional town of
Crosby, where much of her fiction has been set, is a microcosm of the American culture
– neighbors whose personal narratives are unfathomable and often astray while
their motives can be mysterious despite ostensibly simple in design. In this
place we find marriages without passion, angry spouses, false friends,
repressed children, misogyny and harassment… And all, once again, under the watchful
eye of the irrepressible incorrigible, often intolerable, but nonetheless captivating,
Olive Kittredge, the heroine of the eponymous novel that won Strout the
Pulitzer Prize. She’s back in the aptly named, “Olive, Again.”
I confess, when I began reading
this book, I wondered, briefly, why the author, and reader, should go back to
Olive, to her often warped perception and harsh rules, or why I wanted to return
to that town, and those small town people, but, in a matter of pages, it is
clear: the cast of characters is not only a fascination, and the prose exquisitely
crafted, but we need to go back there to be reminded of all that ails us and
what might redeem us.
In the end, to forgive Olive, to understand
her and sympathize with her, is what we all need to do for each other.
Olive’s second husband says it
best: He understood that he was a
seventy-four-year-old man who looks back at life and marvels that it unfolded
as it did, who feels unbearable regrets for all the mistakes made. And then he
thought: How does one live an honest life?
Strout says she took six years to
write that first novel, but clearly those characters remained in her heart and
on her mind. [And watch for a timely reappearance.] Who knows how many stories of
the fictional town residents she has logged over time to resurface at just the
right moment in just the right book, most taking place in that same place.
Here, a decade after her first
appearance, Olive woos us again with her determination to understand herself, as
well as her friends and neighbors and, again, with her surprising compassion for
those least understood, those least seen, as if she has a filter through which
she observes those who need the most and miss what’s right in front of her eyes
that matters more. And, we are right there with her as she grapples with age.
It
was almost panic that she felt. “Damn man” she said, and she meant the doctor,
who was still young and had no idea – he had no idea – what it was like to be
old and alone. But other days she felt okay. Not wonderful. But she could drive
and get her groceries and she visited her friend Edith at that awful old folks’
home she lived in called Maple Tree Apartments. Then when she came home she was
glad to be there, although she could not shake the feeling that it was Jack’s
house. She sat in Jack’s chair these days so that she wouldn’t have to look at
it gapingly empty. And sometimes as she sat there a deep sadness trembled
through her…
Olive is as real as it gets. The
new novel lives up to its origin story and, as award-winning writer Pico Iyer
said recently, Strout may be the most important fiction voice today. In their
deceptively simple way, she and Olive speak for us all. As Olive would say, What a thing!
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