A testament to real people
Elizabeth Strout brings back Olive and other nostalgic characters with 13 stories
Elizabeth Strout thought she’d closed the book on Olive Kitteridge a decade ago, with her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel-in-stories of the same name. But Olive, as absorbing and original a character as has been created in the past 50-odd years — think John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom or Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe — would not be so easily shut away. As Strout writes in her Reader’s Note prefacing “Olive, Again”: “I felt she was poking me in the ribs, saying, ‘Come on, come on, let’s do this.’ ” And the fact is, we are all the luckier for it.
“Olive, Again” follows much the same path as its predecessor. The 13 stories that make up this novel — though one wonders why that tag need be applied — are as much about those who inhabit Olive’s world as Olive herself. In some, she takes centre stage. In others, Olive is only briefly glimpsed, more often than not offering a characteristically thorny remark, as in “Exiles” when she tenders her opinion on a display of local art: “God, have I seen enough of this crap!”
With “Exiles,” as well as with the story “Friend,” Strout takes the opportunity to revisit characters from two earlier novels “The Burgess Boys” and “Isabelle and Amy.” Each, as well as offering a touch of literary nostalgia, is a wonderful rumination on the painful decisions that life sometimes forces on us and how, as Bob Burgess (who makes a reappearance in this novel) points out, “It should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect.”
This has always been Strout’s great strength: the respect she shows her characters, regardless of how they choose to face the world. More so than anyone writing today, Strout is able to give us, on the page, in all their frustrating and heartbreaking and engaging beauty, real people. Olive, herself, is testament to this.
In her 80s now, and twice-widowed, Olive — as ornery, endearing and wickedly funny as ever — is struggling not so much with mortality as with the indignities of aging, chief among these being that same “essential loneliness.” In story after story — be it the uplifting “Light” in which an artless Olive becomes the only comfort to a former student battling cancer, or “Motherless Child” that finds her realizing she has more in common with her son Christopher’s second wife than she is comfortable with, or the achingly poignant and affecting “Heart” that sees her discover “the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be” — Strout magnificently exposes, along with the pang of regret, the pain of loss and the maddening barriers we erect to protect ourselves from the everyday letdowns of life, the true resilience and wonder of the human heart.