Olive Kitteridge/Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Olive Kitteridge and rightly so as it’s a fine novel. The structure is a collection of short stories set in the coastal town in Maine with the common theme of Olive Kitteridge, a former maths teacher in the local school appearing in all but the last one. Generally the temptation by a writer is to make his/her central character an attractive one but physically and emotionally Olive is not. She is a big, untidy woman physically and an opinionated and domineering one emotionally. One of the many attractions of the novel is the skillful way the writer presents her characters. The reader neither empathises nor judges which is often what Life as opposed to fiction is like. In one of the best stories Security Olive visits her son Chris and his family in New York with whom she has a troubled relationship. She feels let down, used and dissatisfied but the story switches to the son’s viewpoint and you can see why.

The stories are also well written and observed in regard to location and character. And Tyler, in particular, has built a considerable reputation by books that do not extend beyond her native Baltimore. I wonder if there is an essay to be written on female novelists whose imagination and writing extends beyond their narrow locale (the Brontes being an obvious example) but in short they bely the notion hat novelist have to lead an eclectic and varied life to write.

There is also a humorous touch. In Security there is a parrot that reacts to any form of obscenity and squawks as the family drama unfurls.

It’s difficult to critics the novel. The stories contain a greater number of characters than the normal novel and it’s sometimes difficult to keep track of them. Some may find the degree of tragedy that befall the characters depressing and the female characters too unpleasantly oppressive. Others may have difficulty with a novel that is unconventional as there is no arc of plot nor chapters.

I could not recommend this novel strongly enough.