Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge won the Pulizer Prize last year, so I won’t spend time telling you that this book is beautifully and compellingly written. Or that it’s good. At this point, these things are evident. Instead, I want to tell you about how Olive Kitteridgemade me feel.

OK (as I affectionately referred to it in my head) made me feel like I was sitting in a cabin in Maine, looking out at the water, drinking a cup of coffee, and talking to my very funny, bittersweet Grandmother.  It feels homey and intimate — as though you have always known the characters who poulate this book and are finally being let in on their secrets. I always harp on my students to avoid using first or second person pronouns when writing analytically about literature, but that’s the thing about Olive Kitteridge; while it is fantastic prose well-worthy of analysis, the brain and heart stop at “reader response”. You feel so much for these characters that you hardly care what motifs run throughout each story. The reader gets entirely consumed in “we” and “I”.

The book is billed as a “novel told in stories”. Indeed, each of the thirteen individual stories could stand alone, but put together they complete a narrative arc in the life of Olive Kitteridge, a blunt, no-nonsense former schoolteacher who rules her home   — and the town — with an iron fist. Olive’s life is clearly irrevocably woven into the life of the town; while only a handful of stories explicitly focus on Olive, her presence and influence are everywhere. The reader follows — directly and indirectly — Olive from middle age to her mid-seventies. We see the dynamic changes in her relationship with her saintly husband, Henry. We see her struggles with what it means to be a good mother, and how to cope with a son whose world does not revolve around hers. We see her letting go of loves and finding new loves in unexpected places.

I picked up Olive Kitteridge for all of the good, very serious, literary reasons — I liked the cover and it won the Pulitzer Prize.  While I liked the first story, I kept reading because I had purchased this book and because that’s what (in my mind) smart, good readers do — they plug away and keep reading.  And then I read “Winter Concert” (about halfway through), and I fell in love. This story follows a husband and wife in their seventies as they attend a concert in town. In so doing, the husband’s secret is revealed which ultimately unearths the pain of betrayal long past and long forgiven. In the end, the couple realize that they are at the end of their lives, but they still have one another. And that’s enough to make them forgive and forget anything. It’s raw and heartbreaking. Another favorite is “Tulips”, an Olive-centric story, about her husband’s hospitalization following a stroke.  Admittedly, this story did send my literary analysis meter into overdrive, as I delighted at the parallels between Strout’s story and Sylvia Plath’s poem of the same name about hospitalization (although with a clearly different message). Oh, how I love Plath … and how I love Strout.

Olive Kitteridge grew on me slowly and quietly. It is the kind of book that rewards its readers for sticking with it.  Even as I just finished it, I can’t wait to read it again. Maybe in Maine.