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Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge Paperback – September 30, 2008

by Elizabeth Strout (Author)

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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • The beloved first novel featuring Olive Kitteridge, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Oprah’s Book Club pick Olive, Again

“Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her.”—USA Today

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post Book World • USA Today • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Seattle Post-Intelligencer • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Christian Science Monitor • The Plain Dealer • The Atlantic • Rocky Mountain News • Library Journal

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life—sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition—its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.

The inspiration for the Emmy Award–winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, and Bill Murray

Book 1 of 2

Olive Kitteridge
Print length

336 pages
Language

English
Publication date

September 30, 2008
Dimensions

5.2 x 0.72 x 7.95 inches
ISBN-10

0812971833
ISBN-13

978-0812971835
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People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it.
Highlighted by 4,323 Kindle readers
It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert.
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No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other.
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From the Publisher

The beloved first novel featuring Olive Kitteridge, from the author of OLIVE, AGAIN

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Perceptive, deeply empathetic . . . Olive is the axis around which these thirteen complex, relentlessly human narratives spin themselves into Elizabeth Strout’s unforgettable novel in stories.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Fiction lovers, remember this name: Olive Kitteridge. . . . You’ll never forget her. . . . [Elizabeth Strout] constructs her stories with rich irony and moments of genuine surprise and intense emotion. . . . Glorious, powerful stuff.”—USA Today

“Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she’s not onstage, we look forward to her return. The book is a page-turner because of her.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Olive Kitteridge still lingers in memory like a treasured photograph.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Rarely does a story collection pack such a gutsy emotional punch.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Strout animates the ordinary with astonishing force. . . . [She] makes us experience not only the terrors of change but also the terrifying hope that change can bring: she plunges us into these churning waters and we come up gasping for air.”—The New Yorker

About the Author

Elizabeth Strout is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Olive, Again, an Oprah’s Book Club pick; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name is Lucy Barton, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Burgess Boys, named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and NPR; Abide with Me, a national bestseller; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Orange Prize. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. Elizabeth Strout lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1
Pharmacy

For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold. The pharmacy was a small two-story building attached to another building that housed separately a hardware store and a small grocery. Each morning Henry parked in the back by the large metal bins, and then entered the pharmacy’s back door, and went about switching on the lights, turning up the thermostat, or, if it was summer, getting the fans going. He would open the safe, put money in the register, unlock the front door, wash his hands, put on his white lab coat. The ritual was pleasing, as though the old store—with its shelves of toothpaste, vitamins, cosmetics, hair adornments, even sewing needles and greeting cards, as well as red rubber hot water bottles, enema pumps—was a person altogether steady and steadfast. And any unpleasantness that may have occurred back in his home, any uneasiness at the way his wife often left their bed to wander through their home in the night’s dark hours—all this receded like a shoreline as he walked through the safety of his pharmacy. Standing in the back, with the drawers and rows of pills, Henry was cheerful when the phone began to ring, cheerful when Mrs. Merriman came for her blood pressure medicine, or old Cliff Mott arrived for his digitalis, cheerful when he prepared the Valium for Rachel Jones, whose husband ran off the night their baby was born. It was Henry’s nature to listen, and many times during the week he would say, “Gosh, I’m awful sorry to hear that,” or “Say, isn’t that something?” Inwardly, he suffered the quiet trepidations of a man who had witnessed twice in childhood the nervous breakdowns of a mother who had otherwise cared for him with stridency. And so if, as rarely happened, a customer was distressed over a price, or irritated by the quality of an Ace bandage or ice pack, Henry did what he could to rectify things quickly. For many years Mrs. Granger worked for him; her husband was a lobster fisherman, and she seemed to carry with her the cold breeze of the open water, not so eager to please a wary customer. He had to listen with half an ear as he filled prescriptions, to make sure she was not at the cash register dismissing a complaint. More than once he was reminded of that same sensation in watching to see that his wife, Olive, did not bear down too hard on Christopher over a homework assignment or a chore left undone; that sense of his attention hovering—the need to keep everyone content. When he heard a briskness in Mrs. Granger’s voice, he would step down from his back post, moving toward the center of the store to talk with the customer himself. Otherwise, Mrs. Granger did her job well. He appreciated that she was not chatty, kept perfect inventory, and almost never called in sick. That she died in her sleep one night astonished him, and left him with some feeling of responsibility, as though he had missed, working alongside her for years, whatever symptom might have shown itself that he, handling his pills and syrups and syringes, could have fixed. “Mousy,” his wife said, when he hired the new girl. “Looks just like a mouse.” Denise Thibodeau had round cheeks, and small eyes that peeped through her brown-framed glasses. “But a nice mouse,” Henry said. “A cute one.” “No one’s cute who can’t stand up straight,” Olive said. It was true that Denise’s narrow shoulders sloped forward, as though apologizing for something. She was twenty-two, just out of the state university of Vermont. Her husband was also named Henry, and Henry Kitteridge, meeting Henry Thibodeau for the first time, was taken with what he saw as an unself-conscious excellence. The young man was vigorous and sturdy-featured with a light in his eye that seemed to lend a flickering resplendence to his decent, ordinary face. He was a plumber, working in a business owned by his uncle. He and Denise had been married one year. “Not keen on it,” Olive said, when he suggested they have the young couple to dinner. Henry let it drop. This was a time when his son—not yet showing the physical signs of adolescence—had become suddenly and strenuously sullen, his mood like a poison shot through the air, and Olive seemed as changed and changeable as Christopher, the two having fast and furious fights that became just as suddenly some blanket of silent intimacy where Henry, clueless, stupefied, would find himself to be the odd man out. But standing in the back parking lot at the end of a late summer day, while he spoke with Denise and Henry Thibodeau, and the sun tucked itself behind the spruce trees, Henry Kitteridge felt such a longing to be in the presence of this young couple, their faces turned to him with a diffident but eager interest as he recalled his own days at the university many years ago, that he said, “Now, say. Olive and I would like you to come for supper soon.” He drove home, past the tall pines, past the glimpse of the bay, and thought of the Thibodeaus driving the other way, to their trailer on the outskirts of town. He pictured the trailer, cozy and picked up—for Denise was neat in her habits—and imagined them sharing the news of their day. Denise might say, “He’s an easy boss.” And Henry might say, “Oh, I like the guy a lot.” He pulled into his driveway, which was not a driveway so much as a patch of lawn on top of the hill, and saw Olive in the garden. “Hello, Olive,” he said, walking to her. He wanted to put his arms around her, but she had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away. He told her the Thibodeaus were coming for supper. “It’s only right,” he said. Olive wiped sweat from her upper lip, turned to rip up a clump of onion grass. “Then that’s that, Mr. President,” she said. “Give your order to the cook.” On Friday night the couple followed him home, and the young Henry shook Olive’s hand. “Nice place here,” he said. “With that view of the water. Mr. Kitteridge says you two built this yourselves.” “Indeed, we did.” Christopher sat sideways at the table, slumped in adolescent gracelessness, and did not respond when Henry Thibodeau asked him if he played any sports at school. Henry Kitteridge felt an unexpected fury sprout inside him; he wanted to shout at the boy, whose poor manners, he felt, revealed something unpleasant not expected to be found in the Kitteridge home. “When you work in a pharmacy,” Olive told Denise, setting before her a plate of baked beans, “you learn the secrets of everyone in town.” Olive sat down across from her, pushed forward a bottle of ketchup. “Have to know to keep your mouth shut. But seems like you know how to do that.” “Denise understands,” Henry Kitteridge said. Denise’s husband said, “Oh, sure. You couldn’t find someone more trustworthy than Denise.” “I believe you,” Henry said, passing the man a basket of rolls. “And please. Call me Henry. One of my favorite names,” he added. Denise laughed quietly; she liked him, he could see this. Christopher slumped farther into his seat. Henry Thibodeau’s parents lived on a farm inland, and so the two Henrys discussed crops, and pole beans, and the corn not being as sweet this summer from the lack of rain, and how to get a good asparagus bed. “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Olive, when, in passing the ketchup to the young man, Henry Kitteridge knocked it over, and ketchup lurched out like thickened blood across the oak table. Trying to pick up the bottle, he caused it to roll unsteadily, and ketchup ended up on his fingertips, then on his white shirt. “Leave it,” Olive commanded, standing up. “Just leave it alone, Henry. For God’s sake.” And Henry Thibodeau, perhaps at the sound of his own name being spoken sharply, sat back, looking stricken. “Gosh, what a mess I’ve made,” Henry Kitteridge said. For dessert they were each handed a blue bowl with a scoop of vanilla ice cream sliding in its center. “Vanilla’s my favorite,” Denise said. “Is it,” said Olive. “Mine, too,” Henry Kitteridge said. As autumn came, the mornings darker, and the pharmacy getting only a short sliver of the direct sun before it passed over the building and left the store lit by its own overhead lights, Henry stood in the back filling the small plastic bottles, answering the telephone, while Denise stayed up front near the cash register. At lunchtime, she unwrapped a sandwich she brought from home, and ate it in the back where the storage was, and then he would eat his lunch, and sometimes when there was no one in the store, they would linger with a cup of coffee bought from the grocer next door. Denise seemed a naturally quiet girl, but she was given to spurts of sudden talkativeness. “My mother’s had MS for years, you know, so starting way back we all learned to help out. All three of my brothers are different. Don’t you think it’s funny when it happens that way?” The oldest brother, Denise said, straightening a bottle of shampoo, had been her father’s favorite until he’d married a girl her father didn’t like. Her own in-laws were wonderful, she said. She’d had a boyfriend before Henry, a Protestant, and his parents had not been so kind to her. “It wouldn’t have worked out,” she said, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Well, Henry’s a terrific young man,” Henry answered. She nodded, smiling through her glasses like a thirteen-year-old girl. Again, he pictured her trailer, the two of them like overgrown puppies tumbling together; he could not have said why this gave him the particular kind of happiness it did, like liquid gold being poured through him. She was as efficient as Mrs. Granger had been, but more relaxed. “Right beneath the vitamins in the second aisle,” she would tell a customer. “Here, I’ll show you.” Once, she told Henry she sometimes let a person wander around the store before asking if she could help them. “That way, see, they might find something they didn’t know they needed. And your sales will go up.” A block of winter sun was splayed across the glass of the cosmetics shelf; a strip of wooden floor shone like honey. He raised his eyebrows appreciatively. “Lucky for me, Denise, when you came through that door.” She pushed up her glasses with the back of her hand, then ran the duster over the ointment jars. Jerry McCarthy, the boy who delivered the pharmaceuticals once a week from Portland—or more often if needed—would sometimes have his lunch in the back room. He was eighteen, right out of high school; a big, fat kid with a smooth face, who perspired so much that splotches of his shirt would be wet, at times even down over his breasts, so the poor fellow looked to be lactating. Seated on a crate, his big knees practically to his ears, he’d eat a sandwich that had spilling from it mayonnaisey clumps of egg salad or tuna fish, landing on his shirt. More than once Henry saw Denise hand him a paper towel. “That happens to me,” Henry heard her say one day. “Whenever I eat a sandwich that isn’t just cold cuts, I end up a mess.” It couldn’t have been true. The girl was neat as a pin, if plain as a plate. “Good afternoon,” she’d say when the telephone rang. “This is the Village Pharmacy. How can I help you today?” Like a girl playing grown-up. And then: On a Monday morning when the air in the pharmacy held a sharp chill, he went about opening up the store, saying, “How was your weekend, Denise?” Olive had refused to go to church the day before, and Henry, uncharacteristically, had spoken to her sharply. “Is it too much to ask,” he had found himself saying, as he stood in the kitchen in his undershorts, ironing his trousers. “A man’s wife accompanying him to church?” Going without her seemed a public exposure of familial failure. “Yes, it most certainly is too goddamn much to ask!” Olive had almost spit, her fury’s door flung open. “You have no idea how tired I am, teaching all day, going to foolish meetings where the goddamn principal is a moron! Shopping. Cooking. Ironing. Laundry. Doing Christopher’s homework with him! And you—” She had grabbed on to the back of a dining room chair, and her dark hair, still uncombed from its night’s disarrangement, had fallen across her eyes. “You, Mr. Head Deacon Claptrap Nice Guy, expect me to give up my Sunday mornings and go sit among a bunch of snot-wots!” Very suddenly she had sat down in the chair. “Well, I’m sick and tired of it,” she’d said, calmly. “Sick to death.” A darkness had rumbled through him; his soul was suffocating in tar. The next morning, Olive spoke to him conversationally. “Jim’s car smelled like upchuck last week. Hope he’s cleaned it out.” Jim O’Casey taught with Olive, and for years took both Christopher and Olive to school. “Hope so,” said Henry, and in that way their fight was done. “Oh, I had a wonderful weekend,” said Denise, her small eyes behind her glasses looking at him with an eagerness that was so childlike it could have cracked his heart in two. “We went to Henry’s folks and dug potatoes at night. Henry put the headlights on from the car and we dug potatoes. Finding the potatoes in that cold soil—like an Easter egg hunt!” He stopped unpacking a shipment of penicillin, and stepped down to talk to her. There were no customers yet, and below the front window the radiator hissed. He said, “Isn’t that lovely, Denise.” She nodded, touching the top of the vitamin shelf beside her. A small motion of fear seemed to pass over her face. “I got cold and went and sat in the car and watched Henry digging potatoes, and I thought: It’s too good to be true.”

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (September 30, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0812971833
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0812971835
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.2 x 0.72 x 7.95 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #12,781 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Elizabeth Strout

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Elizabeth Strout is the author of the New York Times bestseller Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine and New York City.

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E. Scerbo

Awful, just repugnant

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 23, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is toxic. It is repulsive. It is just bad. I am bordering on feeling offended that there should exist a list more finely filtered than "Books" which contains this book and McCarthy's The Road or this book and Robinson's Gilead. Look no further than "Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners" for an example of such a list.

Gilead and The Road are two of my favorite books ever written. The philosophy. The vocabulary. The cadence in the writing. The imagery. How OK is placed on a par with those masterpieces is lightyears beyond me. How about a few sample passages from each?

Gilead:

"I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets."

" "For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him?" In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable-which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live."

"I went up to the church to watch the dawn come, because that peace does restore me better than sleep can do. It is as though there were a hoard of quiet in that room, as if any silence that ever entered that room stayed in it."

Hoard of quiet... Jesus.

"The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light.... It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love."

The Road:

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

"Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence."

"He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death. He slept little and he slept poorly. He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory."

"The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor and the cold crept down and the dark came early and the scavengers passing down the steep canyons with their torches trod silky holes in the drifted ash that closed behind them silently as eyes."

Now how about from OK?

"Had the Larkins stopped going to visit their son? Nobody knew, and after a while people did not talk too much about it; sometimes people driving past the house-large and square, painted pale yellow-even turned their heads away, not wanting to be reminded of what could happen to a family that had seemed as pretty and fresh as blueberry pie."

"Pain, like a pinecone unfolding, seemed to blossom beneath her breastbone."

"One and a half years later, [her husband's death] still squeezed Olive so hard she felt like a package of vacuum-packed coffee."

"She stepped into the room, put her handbag on the floor. He didn't sit up, just stayed there, lying on the bed, an old man, his stomach bulging like a sack of sunflower seeds."

These are quite possibly the worst similes I've ever read. Did a high-school student write these? In what way can a family be reasonably compared to a blueberry pie in the sense of being "pretty and fresh"? In what sense can pain be "like a pinecone unfolding"? Is it the pain that's like a pinecone? Or does she feel like there is a pinecone wedged beneath her breastbone which is starting to unfold, thus causing pain? Do either of these interpretations make sense? I have no idea what it means to feel like a package of vacuum-packed coffee. And why sunflower seeds? Why not sand? Salt? Sugar? Marbles? What do sunflower seeds have to do with anything?

Obviously, I'm cherry-picking. I've chosen some of my absolute favorite passages from Gilead and The Road. I'm pretty sure I'd think those passages would make parts of Melville or Faulkner seem childish by comparison. And I've chosen the absolute worst of OK. But my point is twofold: First, the average writing of The Road and Gilead is about as close to their chosen passages as the average writing of OK is to its. And secondly, *no book* that wins the Pulitzer should have *that many* lines which are as bad as those. Those are terrible. And while they are definitely the worst ones in my opinion, there are others that are close.

So I'm truly puzzled when I read review after review talking about the quality of the writing. Compared to what? Twilight? 50 Shades? Rap lyrics? (Actually, that's probably not accurate. I'm pretty sure I could bust out a few lines from a few rap songs that are way better than a good chunk of the writing in OK.) The writing is serviceable at best. It is mostly competent, with the occasion foray into WTF territory.

I mean this on a local scale, on a sentence to sentence, metaphor to metaphor basis. The global structure is better. She does indeed control information quite well, releasing little tidbits ahead of time to put you on edge and give you the sense that something bigger is coming. I did enjoy that, and i do think it was done impressively. But it's not enough to salvage this book from my many other problems with it. And also, while I'm talking global structure, I should add, this book does not feel like a "novel in short stories" a la Go Down, Moses. When we are reminded for the sixth time in the second-to-last story that Olive was a 7th grade math teacher, when we are told in every story that her husband was named Henry, and they have a son named Christopher who married a "hellion", well, these start to read much more like independent works than intertwined ones. If they were truly intertwined, if we should glean information about each one from the others, then this sort of repetition would be unnecessary, right? It reads much more like a collection of short stories written independently of each other but involving the same characters pasted together and called a novel.

And a minor grievance: I'm fairly confident "kitty-corner" doesn't mean what Strout or her editor think it means. It's pretty clear from context she is using the word to describe two people sitting on *adjacent* sides of a table, not opposite diagonally from each other. But maybe I'm wrong.

The plot is a nothing. Each story has either no plot or a contrived one. The one where Olive exigently rushes into a hospital ER for a bout of "explosive diarrhea", then somehow gets talked into staying for an examination, even though there's nothing wrong with her, just because Strout needs her to stay in the ER long enough for there to be an armed robbery... Wow. That was bad. The other ones are boring for the most part. This is not inherently bad, but it surely earns the book no brownie points.

And the characters. I've never read about a bunch of more unlikeable people. And the fact that OK is a "novel in short stories", with the narrator bouncing around from one unlikeable character to the next, really makes the book seem like an extremely cynical take on humanity. If an author were to focus on a really s***ty person, or a really s***ty family (like, say, Faulkner's Compsons), it just reads like an expose on some crazy, awful, but interesting people. But when Strout picks on so many people in town, almost all of whom are just terrible, terrible, cynical, selfish people... It really starts to seem less an expose, more a worldview. And that's gross.

At no point did I sympathize with anyone except Henry (who gets massively stroked up and vegetablized) and the woman Marlene in "Basket of Trips" (whose husband was banging her cousin). Everyone else was atrocious. I truly do believe that this was written by someone and for people who neither do know nor have known nor ever conceived of true decency in this world. People for whom kindness is synonymous with manipulation. People who feel each person is each other person's plaything. And so I'm further appalled when I read so many glowing reviews mentioning the "truth", "bravery", or "honesty" on display in this novel. (Simply browse through the 5-star reviews on this site for a few examples.) Sure, I guess if you are the kind of person for whom I posit this book is written, you may feel that way. But for anyone who has any hope in the world, who has ever felt or even honestly imagined true love (Platonic or otherwise), where is the "truth", the "honesty" in this book?

And it's not just the negativity that bothers me. I mean, come on, I just listed The Road as one of my all time favorites. Read those quotes above. Has there ever been a more bleak book than that? The Road makes 1984 or any other dystopian novel you can name read like a Disney story. It's the *axiomatic* negativity. The Road treats its bleakness philosophically, honestly wondering what is in this world to live for. And staring into Nietzsche's abyss, wondering if the answer is nothing. And so it's bleak, but it's honest philosophically. This book takes the abyss as postulate. There is no intellectuality. There is just posturing.

In all honesty: This book gets two stars from me if treated as just a soap opera. It's interesting enough in places and has a bunch of "Oh, no he didn't!!" moments (e.g., Kerry telling Marlene at Marlene's husband's funeral that she (Kerry) had been sleeping with the husband), which are ludicrous, but sufficiently so to keep me moderately entertained and interested. But two gets bumped to one because it poses as serious literature.

I cannot say I await anticipatingly Strout's other works.

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HT

Elizabeth Strout is an excellent author who tackles the themes that move through our lives. Read her novels.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 15, 2015

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Officiant: ...for better and for worse; in sickness and in health...?
Bride/Groom: I do
Me (to myself): You have no idea

My wife and I are in that time of our lives where we go to weddings of the kids our kids grew up with. During the last two weddings particularly I've been taken by the innocence, trust and hope the bride and groom have for their future lives. They say "I do" and they mean "I do" but they really have no idea (none of us have) of who their companion is and what the future holds in store for them.

Olive Kitteridge considers this fact when her son is marrying a woman she does not approve of:

"Weeping would not have come close to what she felt. She felt fear, sitting out there on her folding chair. Fear that her heart would squeeze shut again, would stop, the way it did once before, a fist punched through her back. And she felt it, too, at the way the bride was smiling up at Christopher, as though she actually knew him. Because did she know what he looked like in first grade when he had a nosebleed in Miss Lampley's class? Did she see him when he was a pale, slightly pudge child, his skin broken out in hives because he was afraid to take a spelling test? No, what Suzanne was mistaking for knowing someone was knowing sex with that person for a couple of weeks." (p67)

My wife and I have had our share of that future: we are both cancer survivors and have suffered through other maladies, surgeries, and other tests. Our share has been light compared to most; we have four friend couples whose children have been killed. I have no idea what that is like; but looking over the edge of that big black hole I know I'm supremely thankful that our challenges have not included that and hope that we will not.

Married life and the couples in the marriage change over time and the best we can hope is that we come through it together. When we are lucky, as my wife and I are, we come through the years closer and with more compassion and love than when we first met. We have been given the gift of love like Harmon had: "he felt something had been returned to him, as though the inestimable losses of life had been lifted like a boulder, and beneath he saw - under the attentive gaze of Daisy's blue eyes - the comforts and sweetness of what had once been." (p90)

Olive Kitteridge is the title character of a series of vignettes in which she is sometimes the main player, sometimes a side player and sometimes just barely mentioned in passing. Olive is a mean, cantankerous, scary, abusive person moving through life spreading pain along the way. She hurts inside: "She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people." (p148)

In the worst of times we are incapable of expressing or feeling a lifting love: "She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven't wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son." (p71)

In some stories, as in life, the epiphany comes too late: "Angie,...fingering her black skirt, felt she had figured something out too late, an that must be the way of life, to get something figured out when it was too late." (p60)

Through it all, Olive can't relate to any of it. She attends a funeral "hoping that in the presence of someone else's sorrow, a tiny crack of light would somehow come through her own dark encasement. But it remains separate from her,..." (p 171) By the end of the novel we have a clearer picture of Olive; we understand the toll her miserable loneliness and the toll exacts. Would she be able, finally, to "close her eyes to the gaping loneliness of this sunlit world." ?

These are exquisite stories of relationship hits and misses. In addition to compelling dramatic narrative we get Elizabeth Strout's impeccable description of light, clouds, and the bays of Maine. I challenge you to go to a bookstore and read chapter two: Incoming Tide and be able to put the novel down without buying it.

If the brides and grooms are lucky they'll eventually discover "what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn't choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered." (p 270)

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Bernadette Jiwa

A beautiful book I will always return to

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 9, 2022

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Elizabeth Strout's characters hum with humanity. In Olive Kitteridge, she has created a character for the ages.

Strout has a gift for seeing the extraordinary in the everyday. I can still conjure up the love in the mark left on the dresser by a jar of chest rub years after first reading this novel.

I return to Olive Kitteridge when I want to be moved by writing that holds the ordinary up to the light.

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Peter - The Reading Desk

13 episodic stories that are breath-taking in their beauty and eloquence

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 2, 2019

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Olive Kitteridge is a Pulitzer Prize Winner for fiction, which is breath-taking in its beauty and eloquence. The structure of the novel is 13 episodic stories, which provide a candid and searching insight into a small community in the coastal town of Crosby in Maine. It would be unfortunate to race through the pages without savouring the atmosphere, the wonderful sense of time, and the rich array of fascinating characters that enhance the human relationships on display. It takes the little breaks between stories to reflect on the mastery of prose and the observational expression of Elizabeth Strout.

Olive Kitteridge is the indomitable presence throughout the book. Some stories have the faintest mention of Olive while in others she impacts with the overbearing resolve of a woman that is determined to get what she wants. Olive is rarely the focal point, but she acts as a magnet drawing each story to exist in her presence.

Olive is an ex-school teacher, a tall and often clumsy woman, but as the years progress she becomes big,

“… her ankles puffed out, her shoulders rolled up behind her neck, and her wrists and hands seemed to become the size of a man’s. Olive minds – of course she does; sometimes, privately, she minds very much. But at this stage of the game, she is not about to abandon the comfort of food, and that means right now she probably looks like a fat dozing seal wrapped in some kind of gauze bandage.”

Olive has a formidable presence and a complexity that is intriguing and undefinable. While she offers very little filter in her comments and consideration of others and thinks it ludicrous to cry at weddings, she cries when she sees a young anorexic girl, Nina.

“Olive shook her head again, blew her nose. She looked at Nina and said quietly, ‘I don’t know who you are, but young lady, you’re breaking my heart.’
‘I’m not trying to,’ said Nina, defensively. ‘It’s not like I can help it.’
‘Oh, I know that. I know.’ Olive nodded.”

The first story is a touching story of her husband, Harry, who is a pharmacist, and his relationship with a young married assistant who tragically loses her husband. The relationship is subtly transformed from a platonic friendship to the delicate suggestion of deeper feelings as he allows himself to imagine what life would be like with this young woman. The emotional conflict burdens him until he finally asks Olive if she would ever leave him. “Oh, for God’s sake Henry. You could make a woman sick.” she responds.

Most of the following stories reverberate with a sense of betrayal. You can feel the connection with the characters, laugh through incidents, be astounded by some events, nod in recognition with many, and shed a tear or two at others. The writing is emotionally stimulating and reveals such vivid moments that give breath to sentiments you may not have been expecting.

This is a wonderful reading experience, infused with beautiful prose, images and feelings that we all encounter or witness throughout our lives. I would highly recommend this book. The reason why I jumped to read this book after it sitting on my bookshelf for so long, was that the sequel, Olive, Again, is due for release on 31st October this year.

82 people found this helpful

bopa

dont waste your money

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 27, 2019

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Probably the least enjoyable book I've ever read. Had read My name is Lucy Barton for a book group and although I found it an odd story thought I would give the author another try as there have been so many wonderful reviews about her and she had won the Pulitzer prize.
Thought it a thoroughly miserable read. Olive is not a pleasant woman who values no one but herself. Very disjointed book Few connections between one chapter and the next. The most positive thing I can say is that the characters in some chapters were interesting.
My advice is don't bother with this book.

39 people found this helpful

BigBob

Not exactly a laugh a minute...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 31, 2018

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Read by our small, friendly Book Group and found it split opinions down the middle - which is great for lively discussion!
Some did not like the format of 13 short stories about people in the community - 2 of which Olive was not even apparently relevant to.
Not a cheerful book - OK it is showing a community and how people's lives intertwine but surely some people could be happy too...

50 people found this helpful

Alison S

Confusion

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 27, 2019

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I found this book very confusing. Right up to the last chapter I was waiting for the stories to link up. It was a total surprise when I reached the end of the book. The chapters in themselves were interesting snippets and as such were very true to life. However when I read a book I am looking for a satisfying story. Perhaps I missed the links, if I did they were not obvious.

30 people found this helpful

Books R Best

VERY DEPRESSING.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 26, 2018

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I know this book is highly regarded, but I found it a bit depressing. It picked the scabs over the things we all fear, growing old, feeling stupid in front of our children, being alone, helplessness and death. While the book was easy to read I felt quite disturbed by the time I’d finished it, like a wrung-out dish cloth. Why oh, why did she start a short story about a new character and then not tell us the outcome? Half the narratives had no ending at all and left you up in the air. Chosen by our book club it was not something I would ordinarily choose to read and now I know why.

34 people found this helpful

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