Book Review - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

There's something about Olive. She hovers around the edges (and sometimes at the center) of the 13 interrelated stories that make up this novel-and she's...well, strange. You're hard-pressed to like her, yet you can't help loving her.All the stories take place in the small village of Crosby, Maine, and author Elizabeth Strout has drawn a community portrait so exacting that we know all the town landmarks: the hardware store, pharmacy, Methodist church, market, the Warehouse Bar & Grill-and the insides of a good number of homes. We also know the skies, the slant of the sun, and the sound of the tide on the shoreline. And, of course, we come to know the people, including Olive Kitteridge.We come at Olive obliquely-viewed, at first, through the eyes of others. In some stories Olive is merely glimpsed by characters at the back of a church...or remembered briefly as a formidable math teacher. But we first meet her through the eyes of her husband Henry, who runs the local pharma
cy. Henry is beloved by the townsfolk-he's friendly and hospitable with an all-embracing laugh. As one character puts it, seeing Henry "was like moving into a warm pocket of air."Olive is quite the opposite. A single paragraph before Henry's "warm pocket of air" description, we hear the disembodied voice of Olive as she enters the Warehouse Bar & Grill. Letting in a blast of Maine December air, we hear her exclaim, "Too damn bad. I like the cold." It's nice juxtaposition to Henry's kindness.All the characters in this lovely work harbor secrets, sorrows, and an acute sense of aloneness-even in the midst of marriage or relationship. It's true for both Olive and Henry. Henry falls in love with his young cashier at the pharmacy, while Olive, Henry later ascertains, has fallen in love with a fellow middle-school teacher. Neither lets on to the other, yet both of them know and accept-such is their bond.One episode concerns a young anorexic, a girl who (like other characters) h
as appeared in a previous story. Olive takes a sudden and unexpected interest, getting the girl to a hospital and contacting her parents. Her kindness-and involvement-comes as something of a shock, but it's purely Olive. It's how Olive is-and you love her for it.For all her surface gruffness, Olive's well of humanity goes deep. She is there when a young man contemplates suicide, offers an ear to troubled students, or provides empathy to a new widow who has just learned of her husband's betrayal.The real love of her life is Christopher, the Kitteridge's son, but it is love fraught with hurt and disappointment. Time and again, Christopher distances himself from his mother, literally and figuratively. He marries a particularly noxious woman, who then convinces him to move to California, away from the beautiful house that Olive and Henry designed and built for him-a place close by, where the couple had hoped Christoper would remain and raise their grandchildren. After their son
and his wife sell the house, Olive can't bring herself to drive past it, forcing herself to take a different road, a metaphor for changes that Olive, indeed all of us-characters and readers alike-must learn to make and accept in life.In a later chapter/story, Olive visits Christopher and his new wife, now in New York. A blistering confrontation forces Olive to see herself as the mother that Christopher has always seen-overbearing and mercurial, a woman from whom he was desperate to escape. Yet for all her faults as a parent, for all her control and tempers, Olive believes she has acted only out of love. And she has.Elizabeth Strout's prose is delicate yet deft. Whether describing the perennial winter greyness or blazing summer sun, or touching on a character engulfed with sadness or even momentary joy, the author never oversteps. She elicits emotion without sentimentality-and creates a splendid account of humanity, of life and love in a small community. Olive Kitteridge is a
work full of surprise.

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