Book Review: Tell Me Everything

(Bought at Barnes and Noble) Elizabeth Strout brings together the various strands of her previous novels in a touching, heartbreaking finale (or is it?) set in the tiny Maine town of Crosby. The author Lucy Barton continues her friendship with 90-year-old Olive Kitteredge. They visit and tell each other stories of friends and acquittances who led "unrecorded" lives. But neither is the main character. This time it's Bob Burgess (whose story is told in the novel The  Burgess Boys and who has appeared in previous Lucy Barton books.) Bob was traumatized as a child when he believes he accidentally killed his father. In the recent novels, he developed a friendship with Lucy when they started taking long walks to pass the time during the COVID pandemic. The main action of this novel concerns Bob's growing love for Lucy, though both are in relationships. Bob is married to Margaret, a minister and Lucy is living with her ex-husband William. (Both Margaret and William are somewhat narcissistic.) Also, Bob, a lawyer, takes up the case of Matthew, who is accused of killing his mother. Bob and many of the characters are damaged by life. Through small, seemingly insignificant details, Strout examines how our lives are interconnected and we can chose to overcome the ruptures caused by generations of hurt. After telling many sad stories of "unrecorded" people, Lucy asks Olive and Bill what's the point. The response is it's just life. You'll drive yourself crazy if you try to find hidden meaning. Lucy, Bob, Olive, Matthew and the citizens of Crosby muddle through in spite of the pandemic, political fissures, and personal tragedies. All are treated with compassion.

Book Review: Olive, Again

Taken out of the Jackson Heights library. After reading Elizabeth Strout's Lucy by the Sea, where Olive is briefly mentioned as living in a retirement community, I took out Strout's sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge and enjoyed it. The writing style is very different from the Lucy book which is almost Hemingway-esque in its spareness. The third-person narrative is from Olive's point of view, at least in the chapters where she is the main character. In several others, she appears only tangentially. The structure is a collection of interrelated short stories of the residents of the tiny coastal town of Crosby, Maine, some of them have been the protagonists of other Strout novels such as The Burgess Boys and Isabelle and Amy (perhaps I will get to those books later). Everyone in town has secrets and Strout unsparingly shares them and their keepers' humanity and vulnerability. A teenage girl has a bizarre but tender relationship with her teacher's husband. A warring elderly couple attempts to understand their daughter's work as a dominatrix. The brutally honest, undiplomatic Olive examines her life and attempts to mellow as she negotiates relationships with her second husband, her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, and finally with her fellow residents in the retirement complex. Strout expertly depicts the indignities of aging, including incontinence. All the everyday details are here, both unpleasant and endearing.

Book Review: Lucy by the Sea

One of my resolutions of 2023 is to post my reviews of the books I read, no matter how short. I have been doing this on the website Goodreads.com. I did copy over some reviews occasionally in previous years, but I want to start keeping a record of my reading here on the blog. Also to record where I got the book as a journal of my connections with the book world.

Bought at Barnes and Noble for $28 with a few dollars left on a gift card from last year. I really enjoyed reading Strout's fourth novel about Lucy Barton, presumably an autobiographical figure, a novelist dealing with aging, her ex-husband, her two grown-up daughters, and the trauma of growing up within a dysfunctional, poverty-stricken household in a garage rather than a house. (Previous works are My Name Is Lucy Barton, Anything Is Possible, Oh, William. The first one was made into a solo play starring Laura Linney on Broadway.) In this version, Lucy chronicles her experiences of the COVID pandemic. Her ex-husband William, a scientist, brings her to stay in a remote house in rural Maine to avoid the mass infections in NYC. As the lockdown drags on, William and Lucy reconnect, her daughters encounter their own crises, and she makes friends with characters who also appear in Strout's Olive Kittredge novels (Pulitzer Prize, made into an HBO mini-series with Frances MacDormand). Spare, incisive prose cuts to the heart of her characters. Lucy deals with Trump supporters and the BLM movement with compassion. No one is a hero or villain, just people trying to get along.