Our Book Review: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2008)

Why they read this book: Won Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009

Would they recommend this book: Yes

His review: This collection of interconnected short stories sets itself a unique challenge–the stories must stand on their own, and not become simply bridges for the overall story. Yet, the individual stories must connect so that they weave together into a coherent, and engaging tapestry. This collection meets this challenge, even when the title character is simply a passing moment in some stories. And it provides that rare literary work that answers, in the affirmative, my students’ challenge: “Is there any literature that ends happily?” Although, of course, that happiness does have its questions.

I’ll admit this collection drew me in on the second page of the first story, “Pharmacy”, with this description of Olive: “He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away” (6). That simple, yet telling line stayed with me throughout the book, and guided me through Olive and her interactions with others in her town as they struggle with disappointment and unfilled ambitions, including Olive. Other than Rebecca in “Criminal” (the weakest of the stories), these character studies engage us, and yet leave us wanting more; each could have been the focus on their own novel. Olive is not the most important or even the most interesting, but we get to know her the most, and when she seems to find a qualified happiness in her final years, we are not so much rooting for her but for all these characters to find their own way in life.

Her review: The last two sentences of this book read, “it baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.”

What a wonderful, simple and powerful way to end a book. The world inside the book, just a small town is one that at times baffled me, but I sure didn’t want to leave it. There are surely other stories to be told!

The heart of the book, Olive, can, perhaps be hard to like (just ask her son), but her straightforwardness and her open prejudices made her relateable to be, likeable, even. She is only what she is, and her heart is huge: how many characters reflected on her being there for them, in word or action?

Reminiscent of Spoon River Anthology, all the characters in these connected stories are complex with equal parts likeable bits and unlikeable bits (whoo, a lot of affairs going on in Maisy Mills, are there not?). But what a wonderful way to sketch a portrait of a kind of town that is fading out of existence, just like Olive is.

This too is one of those books where the poetry of the language pulled me in as much as anything else. This is a book to be read and to be savored.