Small Town Sketches | Olive Kitteridge

book: Olive Kitteridge | Elizabeth Strout

books:


	• Olive Kitteridge Elizabeth Strout Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 420 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Olive Review

This is a great book that is easy to read. Each chapter is written as a short story and you learn about Olive through her encounters in the short stories.

Small Town Sketches

Many people have recommended this book to me, and it won the Pulitzer for heaven's sake, but I'm afraid I lost interest in it well before the middle, and it took an effort to keep reading. This is not to say it's bad -- in fact, it is very good indeed for what it does. But it is essentially small in scale, and does not address many of the qualities that I look for in fiction.

Elizabeth Strout writes very well indeed, but which I mean the kind of writing that always describes what she means exactly without every calling attention to itself; there are many colors here, but not a hint of purple -- something that would be unthinkable in Downeast Maine. For that is where these stories are set, in the small coastal town of Crosby. The first story features the owner of the local pharmacy, Henry Kitteridge. His wife Olive, the junior-high math teacher and an altogether less genial presence, hovers in the background, but she will flit in and out for the rest of the book. She is hard to like, in fact downright ornery at times, but my goodness she is real. So are many of the other inhabitants of Crosby, some of whom crop up in several stories, some only once. All around, as the stories themselves jump around in time, though primarily addressing the lonely retirement years, Strout builds up a believable portrait of the community and its inhabitants.

But its overall impression is of small events happening to small people in a small town. Actually, I admired the lack of action in the first story, a sensitive probing of the soft spot in his heart that Henry keeps for his former pharmacy assistant, now moved away and the mother of grown children. I was stirred by the magnificently transformative ending of the second story, and kept looking for more things of a similar quality to happen. But as they didn't and the book went on at its level of petty gossip and private tragedy, I found myself ready to scream. The people seemed authentic, and no doubt their concerns meant a great deal to them, but I found myself getting increasingly alienated.

People who have recommended this have referred to it as a story-novel, much in the manner of Tom Rachman's THE IMPERFECTIONISTS. But the publishers, I see, do not use the word "novel" anywhere, which is good because I have yet to be convinced that the form works. But nor do they market it as a story collection, implying that it builds to something greater than the sum of its parts. Just as Sherwood Anderson had done (I think better) in his 1919 classic, WINESBURG, OHIO, you do end up knowing more about the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine, than you did at the beginning. But I found it hard to care about most of them except when they were in the momentary spotlight. So the successive stories blurred the focus rather than sharpening it. But maybe that's just me.

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At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn?t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive?s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life?sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition?its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.

Praise for Olive Kitteridge:

?Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout?s unforgettable novel in stories.?
?O: The Oprah Magazine

?Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You?ll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff.?
?USA Today

?Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she?s not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her.?
?San Francisco Chronicle

?Olive Kitteridge still lingers in memory like a treasured photograph.?
?Seattle Post-Intelligencer

?Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch.?
?Entertainment Weekly

?Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.?
?The New Yorker

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