If you were to describe Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel – and her work more generally - to a newcomer, you might struggle to convey its immense rewards. Here, an irascible, obstinate woman of 90 trades stories with a 66-year-old writer who has recently settled, along with her ex-husband, in the small Maine town of Crosby. Nearly always concerning locals past and present, the tales meander, hopping between generations, and both teller and listener often puzzle and disagree over what meaning they might yield, if any. As Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton feel their way towards a tentative friendship, even the town’s more lurid events – an elderly woman goes missing and her oddball son is suspected of her murder – are absorbed into the gentle pace of their conversations.
And yet, Strout is a magician. From what might seem cussedly bathetic, deliberately underplayed, she produces rabbit after rabbit; moments of such sadness or illumination that the reader may feel momentarily winded before being compelled to continue. Sometimes it is a matter of the compression of backstory: Gloria Beach, the 86-year-old whose body is discovered in a quarry pool in the middle of the novel, has led a life of such suppressed trauma that it seems almost indecent when its details are quickly recounted. And yet this is what we do: the abused child who married another abuser becomes the spiteful dinner lady nicknamed “Bitch Ball”, her bewildered son hypothetically exonerated should he be found to have murdered her. Whole histories, and what Olive and Lucy consistently refer to as “unrecorded lives”, are absorbed into the contours and dispositions of the present moment.
