Olive Kitteridge: Shadow and Light

I was not prepared for the power of Elizabeth Strout's extraordinary novel-in-stories, Olive Kitteridge. I'd read Abide with Me in total and Amy and Isabelle in pieces, and while both of those earlier Strout books are well-made, they aren't nearly as inhabited as Kitteridge, which brings to forceful life a retired schoolteacher who has not made it her business to please. Olive Kitteridge has been herself—her hands the size of a man's, her height unnatural for a woman, her bulk an unapologetic presence. She is frequently disappointed in others. She's not in the habit of honest self reflection. Her husband, Henry, was the good one, the kind soul. She was the undeterred realist.

Novels in stories often don't work—can feel like grab-bag constructions, a publisher's label applied to loosely related themes. This one does. In stories that don't seem to be much about Olive (they are about neighbors, rather, about a piano player or illicit lovers or a young anorexic), she is revealed, and in this lies suspense (one feels her on the horizon, one awaits her knock on the door). In stories in which Olive claims every page, she is transfixing, appalling, somehow sympathetic. She is the shadow and light, wholly given up and over.

Strout's writing here is superb, by which I mean not just her style, but what she has to say about the messy gist of things. I share with you this:

... She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.