7 January 2025 Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, Simon & Schuster, 2008
This is the first novel by Elizabeth Strout featuring Olive Kitteridge and the novel for which Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; it has been described as a novel in short stories. Strout introduces us to Olive Kitteridge, a larger than life figure, but also to the community of Crosby, Maine where Olive taught in the local school and where she lives out her retirement. Strout writes eloquently and sensitively about the coast of Maine and imbues her characters’ feelings with a visceral physicality that often reflects their environment.
Although every chapter includes Olive, every chapter is not about Olive; Strout tells stories of other lives in Crosby as well as the story of the fractured life of Olive, her husband, Henry and their son, Christopher. The resulting structure of the novel is initially confusing. The direction of the narrative is unclear as the reader is drawn into one story, then drawn out before being drawn into another, apparently unconnected, story. Olive, however, is the common thread; the reader experiences her as others see her but also as she experiences her own life. She is not an altogether sympathetic character; she is prone to anger, nastiness and spite but she can be gentle, humane and insightful.
This book divided our group. Half found it a hard-going, confusing, irritating, and in the end, rather pointless read. The other half found the different stories did connect and formed an ultimately satisfying exploration of both one complex woman, and the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives lived in a small town on the east coast of America. Needless to say, there was little give on either side! Although there was a suggestion that if the chapters primarily concerning Olive and her family were extracted from the rest, the reader would be left with a shorter and much better novel. Olive Kitteridge has been well received by critics: ‘as perfect a novel as you will ever read’; ‘Agleam with extraordinary psychological insights’; ‘hypnotic’; ‘exquisite’ but it was most certainly not to everyone’s taste in this group.