OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout (2008)
Our time on this planet is relatively short and if, like Olive Kitteridge, you happen to be “an unapologetic atheist” you don’t even have the consolation of this being prolonged in an afterlife.
Through good health or by good fortune we may live to a ripe age but there are no guarantees. There are several reminders in this marvellous novel that life can take unexpected turns and that tragic accidents or debilitating illness can happen at any time.
Recognition of the brevity of our existence can prompt us to live more intensely with a determination of treat every day as if it might be our last. Equally, the burden of mortality can weigh heavily upon us and make it harder to enjoy a lightness of being.
In extreme cases, out of desperation, suicide is the ultimate get out option. In ‘Incoming Tide’ a man, Kevin Coulson, revisits the town of his youth and recalls the trauma of discovering “his mother’s need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards”.
To call this Pulitzer prize-winning work of fiction a novel is a little misleading since it is really a collection of thirteen stories. Olive Kitteridge is the common thread throughout but not always the main character. In The Piano Player she smiles and waves hello but plays no active part in the story and in ‘Criminal’ she is briefly mentioned only as a scary math teacher.
Elizabeth Strout
In the opening chapter, Pharmacy, it is her sweet-natured husband Henry who takes centre stage with Olive being just a somewhat brooding and malevolent presence in the background.
Gradually her role becomes more prominent and we learn she is a flawed complex character with a strong pessimistic streak which has the potential to eat away at her. This is the root of a feeling of estrangement towards her son, Chris and is the cause of a lot of pain in her life.
In ‘A Different Road’, we are told that she “had never in anyone’s memory felt inclined to be affable, or even polite” but in this and other stories she also shows herself to be a woman with a compassionate understanding of life’s misfits. “People are never as hopeless as you think they are”, she says at one point and she has the wisdom to recognise the terrible consequences of loneliness and confusion : “Olive had the sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became”.
Elizabeth Strout has the storyteller’s gift of investing mundane everyday objects with a profounder significance. For instance, in Starving, one of the best stories, doughnuts come to symbolise temptation and betrayal. These cakes link the tragic case of a young woman who suffers from an eating disorder and the touching tale of a middle-aged man who starts taking doughnuts home to his mistress instead of his wife. They are also one of Olive’s guilty pleasures since she knows that, being overweight, she should really diet.
Set in and around the coastal town of Maine, these are stories which take us into the hidden lives of ordinary folk , often linked to internal doubts or clandestine affairs that fulfil a desperate need for connection. Strout’s writing is full of humanity and she is especially good at showing the physical and intellectual challenges of old age where bodies become weaker but desires remain strong.
Above all, these are the voices of people who endure things in what is often an “insane, ludicrous unknowable world”. John Lennon’s line in Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans is echoed in these stories and stated explicitly in Tulips: “People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it”.
