Simply Exhausting: Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Scribner

Pp. 270

Writer David Nicholls has described this Pulitzer-prize-winning book (in a quote printed on the cover) as “An extraordinarily rich and detailed portrait of both a marriage and a community.” And he’s right. Similar to Lake Woebegone Days or Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café, it is the story of the village – the inhabitants; the relationships; the gossip and the surprises – told in a gentle, meandering style. But it is also nostalgic and elegiac in tone (reminiscent of Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine with focus on crucial social networks being actual rather than just virtual, particularly in our post-lock-down world) while melancholy and loneliness are achingly prominent.

Olive is a retired schoolteacher, married to Henry, who used to be a pharmacist, and with a strained relationship with her son who didn’t turn out to fit into the mould she had made for him. Opinions range among the community, and people view them differently. Olive is probably a Highly Sensitive Person, based on her reaction to stimulus. She understands the needs and motivations of others although when it comes to her own actions, she is not always so self-aware.

Set in the town of Crosby, Maine, the landscape plays a Hardyesque part in the characters’ feelings and experiences. Autumnal colours are encouraging: “It was early September and the maples were red at their tops; a few bright red leaves had fallen onto the dirt road, perfect things, star-shaped.” Winter hues are not: “The leaves were half-gone now. The Norway maples still hung on to their yellow, but most of the orangey-red of the sugar maples had found their way to the ground, leaving behind the stark branches that seemed to hang like stuck-out arms and tiny fingers, skeletal and bleak.”

The novel comprises thirteen short stories that are interrelated but discontinuous in terms of narrative, although the community is everything to itself. Throughout the community, the school and the church remain as focal points, which could be considered both good and bad in a current climate. One character reads in the newspaper, “They were making a film about the towers going down. It seemed to him he should have some opinion about this, but he didn’t know what to think. When had he stopped having opinions on things?” Among the stories, told in the third person free-indirect style (where the language takes on the aspect of the character), there is a funeral reception for adulterous husband, a hostage-taking in a hospital, an anorexic girl spurned by her boyfriend, and an alcoholic lounge pianist reeling from a toxic relationship. The inhabitants of another house only go out at night to preserve their privacy after a family tragedy.

Parochial and insular, the novel is not about global events or political or social issues, but personal battles with nostalgia and loneliness. One of the characters connects music with memories of the past and realises, “She had never liked music. It seemed to bring back all the shadows and aches of a lifetime.” Olive struggles with an introverted/ extroverted personality familiar to many. “She didn’t like to be alone. Even more, she didn’t like being with people.”

If there is a message – and I’m not sure that there is – it is to cherish the moment and be ‘present’ but not in a pumped-up-business-speak way. “Life was a gift – one of those things about getting older was knowing that so many moments weren’t just moments, they were gifts.” Olive knows that “loneliness can kill people” and she divides her life into what she thinks of a ‘big bursts’ and ‘little bursts’, considering that one needs a balance of the two.

Not all of the characters are likeable – not even Olive, who connects them all – but they all have hopes and dreams, at least in the beginning. There are hints of hopefulness towards the end of the novel, but it is overwhelmingly a little bleak and defeatist. As Olive sums it up, “Dying. Not dying. Either way, it tires you out.”