Olive, Again, by Elizabeth Strout
PAUL BAILEY
Olive, Again By Elizabeth Strout Viking, £12.99
Like its wonderful predecessor, Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, Olive, Again is composed of short stories, most of which are set in the port town of Crosby, Maine.
Olive Kitteridge is a constant, unforgettable presence in the book that bears her name though the narrator is attentive to the daily comings-and-goings of Crosby’s other residents, too. Olive is one of those people who are conveniently dismissed as being ‘difficult’, usually by men who believe that the assertion of masculine rights is a perfectly natural way of behaving in society. A ‘difficult man’ is a contradiction in terms.
Elizabeth Strout is a writer with an unerring ear for the things that are meant to be said and for the character-revealing remarks that seem to happen of their own, truthful volition. Crosby, Maine, might be her contemporary equivalent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford or Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.
In Olive, Again the reader is drawn back into the community first encountered a decade ago. There have been changes in the meantime. Olive’s husband Henry, who in the closing pages of Olive Kitteridge suffers a debilitating stroke, dies early in the narrative, and his grieving widow waits a while before agreeing to marry Jack Kennison, a former Harvard law professor whom she initially dislikes. The feeling seems to be mutual. It’s typical of Strout’s mischievous power as a storyteller that she makes this awkward late-flowering union entirely plausible.
Olive Kitteridge in her heyday taught maths in junior high school and is regarded by younger generations in Crosby with either fear or respect; sometimes the two combined. She has never been pretty – a fact that doesn’t bother her a bit. She is big-boned and handsome in her way. Although she is a conscientious housewife, always alert to the latest bargain in the supermarket, she never considers opting for the role of the ‘little woman’ – her sheer bulk would make such a performance risible.
Yet, as is demonstrated without sentimentality in both books, she is deeply aware of the pain others are enduring and, on the rare and moving occasions when she reacts, she invariably finds the right words at her disposal. She may be an interfering busybody, poking her nose where it isn’t wanted, but Strout finds in her the curious grace that comes with inherent kindness. A part of you ends up loving this annoying – and, oh dear, yes, ‘difficult’ woman.
In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, celebrating the art of fiction, Zadie Smith writes of those novelists who enter the minds and souls of their characters. It’s a distinguished roll call, including the unsurpassable Russians, like Chekhov, who wrote mightily in miniature. From our own day, she mentions two who share the creative ideas of Austen and George Eliot and Dickens: Toni Morrison, author of Song of Solomon and Beloved, and the creator of Olive Kitteridge. Olive, in Zadie Smith’s view, is almost independent of the book that seems to contain her, like some New England Micawber.
Auto-fiction is the rage right now, with the feelings and concerns of the author reigning paramount. At their most circumspect, these books read like essays cobbled together to produce something that might be deemed fictional. But Proust was doing this a century ago, while peopling his cascading narrative with Charles Swann, Odette, Madame Verdurin and the Baron de Charlus. Dickens is auto-fictional as David Copperfield and Philip Pirrip. Today, the navel-gazing narrators hold the field, with the rest of society banished from sight.
So Elizabeth Strout might be described as an old-fashioned realistic novelist. But it’s a wholly inaccurate description, barely doing justice to the subtle pleasures of her beautifully structured prose and to the insights into everyday behaviour she sets down apparently so effortlessly. She can be very, very funny, as when she has the daughter of a couple who haven’t really communicated with each other for years reveal to them that she is making a successful career as a dominatrix. Lisa has brought a porn video in which she stars to show them. What follows is surprising and once again believable.
At the end of Olive, Again, Olive remembers gestures of love – from Henry, from the now dead Jack, and from her son Christopher, with whom she is at last at peace. She listens to the birds in the garden outside her window and decides that she is ‘almost happy’. It is enough.