RasoirJ's Book Notes: Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009) (Rating = 5 = I loved it)

Elizabeth Strout’s marvelous story collection/novel makes a quiet, unpretentious splash. It’s a book of 13 short stories, some intertwined and many featuring Olive Kitteridge as the protagonist. What I like best:

• The very credible portraits of real people in a real place, a small town on the Maine coast.

• Strout’s ability to limn the complex, ambivalent emotions of aging among longtime married couples. The stories are filled with longing, loss, accommodation – and the power of deeply sublimated feelings.

• Strout’s facility as a prose stylist, the way she repeatedly comes up with the memorable phrase salted into the right spot.

• The character of Olive – a big woman, physically and emotionally. She’s angry, tough, blunt, stoic, donut-eating, and while not always very self-aware, always a fully rounded human. Whether or not you can appreciate Olive is a good gauge of whether I’ll be able to be a good friend of yours.

QUOTES:

On a young woman in “Incoming Tide; “…she was lovely, the way a sapling might be as the afternoon sun moved over it.”

Olive in “A Little Burst” on why her grown son doesn’t have many friends: “He is like her in that way, can’t stand the blah-blah-blah.”

Olive at her son’s wedding: “They probably think they’re through with loneliness too.”