Whew. What a remarkable and stunning book, unlike anything else I know. I love the Lucy Barton books (all of them) but decided earlier this year to go back and read more backlist Strout since her most recent (Tell Me Everything) involves so many characters from previous books. I struggled with Amy and Isabelle in October and it took me a bit to get around to Olive Kitteridge, but wow am I glad I got here.

This book is so structured in such a personal and peculiar way — the whole episodic form of it is perhaps closest to Anything is Possible (the set of stories set in Lucy Barton’s hometown), but in titling it Olive Kitteridge, as she does, Strout tells us — as my writing teacher often says of poets and their titles — how she wants us to read it. Olive is a character and a protagonist like no one I have ever met in literature, and the way Strout is able to grant us access to her interiority, and that of so many people we meet in Crosby, Maine, is a miracle. The question of a character’s (much less a protagonist’s) being likable is astonishing here — for we love Olive, and the various ways we see and feel her flaws allow us to both love her fully and accept how profoundly, truly, and and often disappointingly human she is, as we are.

The book is at once so quiet — these short stories focused on individual lives of the people in the town and all their ongoing griefs and loves and hopes — and always brimming, certainly with Strout’s stunning and granular nature writing, but also with people: the book is (in a great and often overwhelming way) overpopulated almost in the style of a Dickens or a Tolstoy novel, people everywhere with almost-similar names and even, somehow, similarly-human heartaches and failings.

I do often find Strout fatphobic  — as I read Amy and Isabelle this fall, it became acute and frustratingly, glaringly obvious to me — and I wonder what I would find if I reread the Lucy Barton books now with this feeling already bothering me. Every body part on any fatter character (including the title Olive, but not  limited to her…at all) is described in its size, pejoratively and repeatedly, as nauseum. Occasionally it is as the butt of a joke (as in Amy and Isabelle), but more often it just seems like this is the most important and repeated physical descriptor the narrator has. I can’t tell if this is a backlist problem that I would hope Strout has addressed herself and in her narrators’ voices, or if this is an ongoing failing and disappointment I will have to bear if I want to read Strout’s work.

And I do — I find it heart-stopping, astonishingly often, in its quiet and vivid observations on what it is to be a human being in this world. So much of this book feels simply miraculous, and every time I put it down — after reading a page or a chapter or finishing it today — I felt lucky to get to read it.

Short stories set mostly in the small town of Crosby Maine, where Olive Kitteredge is aging.  Sometimes she is the focus of the story, sometimes she just plays a bit role in a story about others in the town.  There are stories about marriage and friendship and small town mores, and parent-child relationships (which I found most gut wrenching as the mother of an only child son who is now an adult living almost on the other side of the continent).  Strout is a beautiful writer and conveys sparingly the deep love Olive has for her students, her husband and son and her struggles to express that love.

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