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.
