San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Olive Kitteridge: tart, pained and a wonder
Tall, bigboned Olive Kitteridge once frightened the seventhgraders in her math classes. Outside the classroom, in the coastal Maine town of Crosby, she was, if not quite “a character,” a woman whose outspoken ways kept many townspeople at arm’s length. Opinionated and sourtempered, she did not suffer fools gladly, even as she sometimes overlooked her own foolishness.
Elizabeth Strout, whose “Olive Kitteridge” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, offers us a sequel in “Olive, Again.” Once again, it’s a collection of stories — not a novel, as the publisher calls it — revolving around Olive. In most of them, she appears as the intriguing central character. The results are less satisfying when she’s present only in a cameo role, even as they shed light on the town’s secret sorrows.
Crosby’s motto, you see, might well be the Beatles’ lyric “all the lonely people.” This is no charming tourist destination. Suicide, alcoholism, sexual abuse and more take their toll.
Olive, now in her 70s and then 80s, has retired. Her only child, Christopher, lives far away, and remains emotionally distant. Since the death of her husband, Henry, she’s taken up with an unlikely suitor, Jack Kennison. A retired history professor at Harvard, Jack moved into town and soon became a widower. Never mind Olive’s provincialism — Jack finds her blunt, sharptongued take on the world refreshing. Theirs is anything but a perfect relationship, yet no bar to their eventual decision to marry.
Strout makes her Dependswearing old folks something close to endearing. The frailties of aging are fodder for both compassion and humor. The author also allows glimpses into Olive’s tender regard for those less fortunate than her — a former colleague dealing with cancer, or a home health aide whose pickup bears an offputting Donald Trump bumper sticker.
Olive’s compassion for these wounded souls mirrors Strout’s. Olive may not care what most people think of her, but she is troubled that her relationship with Christopher is so striferidden. She, “who always thought she knew everything that others did not,” has failed to comprehend his repulsion at her attempts at micromanaging his life.
The penultimate line of “Olive Kitteridge” — “it baffled her, the world” — hovers over this book as well. Shrewd as Olive is, she stumbles more often than not. Selfknowledge seems beyond her reach. Unlike mathematics, it’s bereft of precise answers.
Unfortunately, Strout’s tendency to detour into the oddities of minor characters becomes a distraction. One young woman returns to town from New York to announce to her parents that she’s a dominatrix. An elderly woman in a nursing home confesses that she sexually abused her infant son, who later was convicted of murder. It’s as if Strout wants us to know that Olive, however flawed, however cranky, still remains on the side of the gods.
In the nursing home herself at last, Olive proclaims, “I do not have a clue who I have been. Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.” For Strout, it seems, that goes as well for most of us.