Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction last year for this novel in short story form. Olive Kitteridge is a complex woman: a Maths teacher, wife, mother of a negligent son. A large woman, she is judgmental and dismissive of many of the townspeople in the small seaside village in which she lives, and hard on those closest to her.
As one of the town's older women notes, "Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology." Olive's son puts it more bluntly. "You say you want to leave, then accuse me of kicking you out. In the past it would make me feel terrible, but… this is not my doing… You make people feel terrible," he tells her.
Her complexity is explored as we read stories from different perspectives. Not all of them are purely about Olive, each is complete in itself; but she drifts in and out of them, sometimes in the periphery, sometimes centre-stage.
I had decided she was a bit of a beast of a woman, until the story when she hops in the car with an unsuspecting ex-student contemplating suicide, and she bores him into choosing to live! In another story she bullies a grieving man into deciding to keep going. In still another she shows an excessive care for an anorexic girl.
In total there are 13 stories that reveal not just much about Olive, but much about ourselves. Strout forces us to consider ourselves in light of the perspectives of others. I was challenged to consider how beastly I have been to my husband; how my children might interpret my well-meaning focused attention as overbearing; how my judging of others might fail to take into account their stresses and positive qualities.
As well as a book about a person, this is a revealing insight into community: the pushes and pulls of relationship. The pains and joys of all sorts of relating: marriage, parent/child, friends, neighbours, teacher/student. The little things we do that hurt others, or that make others' lives easier. How dependent we are on others, especially to kindle hope.
Among the multitude of characters, there is a multi-dimensional portrait of a Christian in the book, a side-character who is a tenant, who has a parrot who has been trained to say "Praise God" every time it hears a swear word! There is a neat exchange about what it means to be a real Christian, a fundamentalist, or fundamentally Christian.
This book is an amazing achievement. There are more than 90 major and minor characters whose lives intersect in sometimes unexpected ways. Each story feels different, but provides a slice of revelation into human nature.
While this book has been reviewed as being about "ordinary life", I would argue that there are times when it feels there is a little too much going on in this small town. A murder and a hostage-taking push the boundaries of ordinary, and there is perhaps a little too widespread infidelity.
In spite of this tendency to be sensational, in the end, you feel with Olive as she has gone through a very gradual process of transformation and ponders (rather than deals with) all the regrets in her life. In the end it is love that is the key; opening her eyes to love of herself, and her failure to love others as they deserved.
It was Augustine who said we are all beasts in our sinfulness, and that the key to transformation is indeed love; but we need love outside of ourselves, divine love expressed through Jesus' dying and rising.
