‘Olive Kitteridge’ (2008) and ‘Olive, Again’ (2019) by Elizabeth Strout
‘Olive Kitteridge’ directed by Lisa Cholodenko (HBO mini-series ,2014)
How many books really stick in the mind? Frequently, I struggle to recollect plots and characters of novels I know I have read, even those I have enjoyed.
I first read ‘Olive Kitteridge’ soon after it earned Elizabeth Strout the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and casually decided to re-read it after watching the excellent HBO TV series based on the novel.
I immediately continued to the follow up, ‘Olive, Again’ and feel now slightly bereft that this is the end of her story (unless Strout decides to write about the first 60 years of her life!)
I was struck by just how much I had forgotten or completely overlooked in the original novel. In revisiting it, the theme of ageing now resonated more fully with my own life. There’s quite a difference between reading this book in middle-age and now I am at an age (approaching 65) regarded by institutions and individuals as officially old. You can soften this with terms like ‘silver surfers’ or speak in terms of the ‘third age’ but the hard truth is that I am (if I’m lucky) entering the last couple of decades of my life.
As I get older, mortality is no longer an abstract concept but a harsh reality. This is the first full year without my mother who died on Christmas Day 2021 aged 93 (my father passed away in 1986 aged 60).
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The title of one of the chapters in this hefty tome is called ‘Just Too Damned Fast’ which sums up how most people feel about the rapidity of change in the modern age.
As a picaresque, comic novel this, at first glance, appears to be an unlikely winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Yet, although there are moments of high farce, there is a serious message behind the humour.
So far this year I have read two prize-winning ‘novels’ – The Sell Out by Paul Beatty (
Vietnam was a war that was technically won by the Viet Cong but which American are reluctant to concede to having lost. The unnamed Vietnamese Army Captain narrating this tale has sympathies with both sides but this only serves to place him between a rock and a hard place.
