Olive Kitteridge

My review of best-seller Olive Kitteridge: Fiction

Life Hands Out a Licking, September 30, 2009


4.5 stars. The setting of Elizabeth Strout's extraordinary short stories is small town Maine and the people are utterly middle class (and exclusively white or very nearly so). Small town and middle class, yes, but not in a Babbitt (Signet Classics) way.

Retired school teacher Olive Kitteridge holds center stage in most of the stories. I heard her described as `a force of nature', an apt description particularly if one pictures mostly stormy weather. It is a good thing the book consists of shorts because few readers could make it through a full book of Olive. Olive is not easy to take and yet in the stories she is a compelling figure, excruciatingly human but not quite pathetic.

As I read these stories, I kept picturing the `KER-POW' and `BIF-BAM' graphics on the old Batman TV series. People do get battered, seldom physically and only occasionally by Olive. Life hands out a licking. (If you're 50 and haven't figured that out yet, you may be a Panglossian or just incredibly lucky. In that case, your luck could be about to change.) And yet the people in the stories often seem quite placid, quiet, and calm - normal as normal can be. And they are, but then you find that they are dealing with one or another of our utterly human pains, sometimes physical, nearly always emotional. Children, aging, your children aging, marriages, illnesses, adulteries, suicides, insanities, accidents - they are all in here, not sensationally, but just as part of life, if you hang around long enough.

Strout's writing powerfully draws the reader into each story. I found the book to be emotionally exhausting, but very often insightful in direct and uncomplicated ways. Great stuff.
 


Check out World Wide Words - a "British view of English".

Panglossian: A person who is optimistic regardless of the circumstances.


Or, to put it in the words of the optimistic Dr Pangloss, the philosopher and tutor in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. We are as profoundly sceptical of this philosophy as Voltaire intended us to be, since Dr Pangloss was old, pedantic and deluded, maintaining his misguided beliefs even after experiencing great suffering.