Written by Elizabeth Strout
I picked up Olive Kitteridge based on a summer reading recommendation in an issue of Newsweek…and I wasn’t disappointed.
Olive Kitteridge seems very much to contemporary American storytelling what Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel seems to be to Canadian fiction. The book’s titled protagonist is a fierce-willed, obstinate, blunt woman with the personality of a bulldog. She’s difficult to love, hard to like, and she occupies her place in time and space in a very concrete fashion, which causes her aura to bump continually into others…in a way that could never be described as delicate. The scene where she satisfies her vengeance against her new daughter-in-law by taking a magic marker to her wardrobe tells you a great deal about the psychological make up of this woman.
Unlike The Stone Angel, this isn’t a sweeping epic of historical biography. Olive Kitteridge has a fascinating, small-scale structure, akin to its primarily small town setting. Olive is the main character of the book, but we get to know her through a variety of ways, each one revealing little fragments of insight into her existence. Olive’s story takes up approximately half the novel. The other half is a series of short stories that highlight friends, neighbours & acquaintances…with Olive moving through their lives at key moments. It makes for some fascinating detours and short cuts…although two of the supporting stories didn’t enrapture me on the same level as the primary, Olive-dominated tales.
The novel is a deft blend of regret and recrimination — the two most powerful, tragic, and bittersweet drivers of good storytelling & character development. My only complaint overall is that there wasn’t MORE to read! A slim volume of 200-odd pages, it deserves the sweeping length of its cousin, The Stone Angel. That said, I’ll gladly take the delicious wit and wisdom that Elizabeth Strout imparts, and enjoy the book on its own merits. A pity…it leaves much of Olive’s legendary, tantalizing past as a teacher to the realm of imagination. While I pride myself on the quality of my imagination, I would have eagerly traded it for more quantity of story & pages.
But as I said, I’ll try NOT to be greedy…and neither should you. The Pulitzer-Prize winning Olive Kitteridge is a definite winner.
