Published in 2008, this is by Elizabeth Strout. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. And it not only weighed in at No. 74 on last year's NYT list of best books of the 21st century so far, but also featured on the complementary readers' list.

Primarily I read it because a friend recommended it, and as we were staying at her place, it was right under my nose, ready to read. You need a different technique for borrowed books, though. No getting all enthusiastic with the highlighter... So that's been interesting. Reading. Taking the occasional photograph of a page. Finishing. Going back through, to make notes, and take a couple more photographs...



The book is a suite of 13 inter-related stories, all set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine, and all featuring -- sometimes in the foreground, sometimes in the background -- a woman called Olive Kitteridge. Apparently, this format is known as a novel-in-stories or linked story collection.

Although I appreciated all the segments, and found many very poignant, it was the ones that homed in on Olive that I really found riveting. And I was slightly dismayed to find Olive is too like me for comfort...

Partly as a result of that, I suppose, I was much more positive about her than many others seem to be. This blogger, for example, describes her as "one of the most obnoxious women I’ve encountered in contemporary fiction". And this is apparently not an uncommon opinion.

I find that terribly unfair... On the one hand, I think it underestimates the effects depression has on our social front; on the other, I think it buys into all the themes of the constrict-women's-behaviour brigade.


Bangladesh, 2014. Definitely not Maine, but I can't help feeling that Strout's book depicts many women, in many different communities

***

Olive is a physically big woman. She's tall, and with age increasingly solid (I'm guessing that's partly to do with her pronounced love of doughnuts). I'm not sure how old she is when we first meet her, but we see her son, Christopher, move from childhood to a late-thirties first marriage, and then to divorce and a second marriage. The book closes with Olive in her sixties and seventies, so we presume that when we first meet her, she's somewhere around the mid-thirties.

Her most obvious characteristic is her straight-from-the-hip outspokenness. She's not a sociable soul, and she's not one to suffer fools gladly. Candidates for fools often include her husband (the gentle, long-suffering Henry), and Christopher. Professionally, she has a reputation for being a tough, no-nonsense teacher. There's no deynying that she can be misanthropic and petty. And throughout most of her life, she doesn't understand the concept of apologizing.

As the stories progress, we realize more and more the impact that depression has had on Olive. Her father committed suicide, and she, too, often struggles with life. At one point, we're told: "She had a darkness that seemed to stand beside her like an acquaintance that would not go away." And she memorably describes how she often feels: "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..."



This has obviously affected her relationship with Henry, but he loves her regardless. More tricky, however, is the way it has coloured her bond with Christopher -- and the way she doesn't really realize this until the end of the book. As far as she is concerned, she always loved him: "She can almost not remember the first decade of Christopher's life, although some things she does remember and doesn't want to. She tried teaching him to play the piano and he wouldn't play the notes right. It was how scared he was of her that made her go all wacky. But she loved him!" She was also concerned about Christopher's own looming depression and apparent loneliness, and took steps to help.

She might well have loved him. She might well have loved him to the very best of her ability. Nevertheless, bit by bit, hint by hint, we learn that she was a pretty harsh mother (even dishing out corporal punishment at times) and she was also an unpredictable mother. In one story we're told how Olive and Henry inadvertently find themselves caught up in an armed hold-up at a hospital. Briefly held hostage, they end up trading insults. Olive was upset that Christopher and his wife have moved all the way to California, away from the nice house close by that his parents built for him. Even worse, when the couple divorced, he has stayed far away. In the tense situation of the hospital siege, Henry responds to an angry comment of Olive's by saying: "[Christopher] left because from the day your father died, you took over that boy's life. You didn't leave him any room."

This seems to be how Christopher sees it too. When his first marriage ends in divorce, he remarries (without telling Olive first), and moves to New York with his new wife (Ann) and the two children she already has from previous relationships.

Perhaps the most harrowing story, entitled Security, relates Olive's visit to this little family. Things become very tense. Christopher and Ann have been in therapy, and Olive has obviously been the subject of some of it. The tipping-point comes when Olive finds she has spilled sundae sauce down her front, but no-one has pointed it out. She feels disparaged because they've left her to go around sticky, like a unimportant and troublesome old woman, as opposed to a normal adult. (Sounds trivial, but I find myself completely understanding Olive... It's the sort of thing that would have tipped me too...) In high dudgeon, she prepares to leave, several days earlier than planned. So there's a big bust-up, and home truths are told. Christopher tells her: "You kind of behave like a paranoid, Mom... You always have... And I never see you taking any responsibility for it. One minute you're one way, the next -- you're furious. It's tiring, very wearing for those around you." Olive takes this very badly, and Ann weighs in: "Chris was only trying to tell you that your moods change kind of fast sometimes, and it's been hard. For him growing up, you know. Never knowing."

Communication grinds to a temporary halt, but doesn't break down entirely. And by the end of the book, Olive knows that she has a bad relationship with her son, and needs to work on it. I guess that's progress.



It's all the more sad that her closest relationships have been problematic, since Olive, underneath her grumpy exterior, is empathetic and compassionate. We see her responding, in an oblique but timely fashion, to would-be suicide Kevin; we see her touched to the core by the plight of anorexic Nina; we see former students remembering with gratitude the interest she took in them, or the things she said. And, ultimately, after Henry's stroke leaves him incapacitated, we see her faithfully visiting him in his nursing-home, doing bits and pieces for him, and talking to him, even though it's uncertain how much he understands.

And Christopher, we have to remember, is not necessarily a reliable witness either... The narrative can't avoid mentioning 9/11, and Christopher's take on some former occupants of his New York neighbourhood is illuminating:

"'There was a store on the corner here, run by guys from Pakistan. Hardly anything in the store. A few cupcakes, a bottle of Coke. Clearly some kind of front. But I'd stop in to buy the paper each morning, and the guy would be real nice... He'd give me this smile, and I'd smile back, and it was sort of understood that he had nothing against me, but if he knew which subway was going to blow, he'd smile and watch me walk to get on it.' Chris shrugged.

"'How do you know that?' [asked Olive].

"'I don't. But I do. The store closed, the guy said he had to go back to Pakistan. It was in his eyes, Mom, that's all I'm saying.'

"Olive nodded, looking at the big wooden table. 'Still, you like it here?'

"'Pretty much.'"

Curiously, there are two other books I'm reading at the moment, which give us, respectively, the perspective of a Pakistani and an Iranian at that pivotal time immediately post 9/11. It's hard to feel that Christopher is being anything other than prejudiced here, and you wonder about the extent to which prejudice clouds his picture of his mother.



Olive, then, is absolutely not the archetypal grandma-figure, all sweetness and big hugs and apple pie. But why should she be? This article quotes James Poniewozik: "Because unlikability is about challenging..., it bangs up against social expectations that women should not challenge us -- that they should be pleasers and peacemakers, that we should be comfortable with them in a way we don’t necessarily expect with men... In recent years, we’ve moved beyond that bind [of disliking unlikeability] to an extent in dramas about antiheroes –- but it’s no coincidence that antiheroines are fewer and farther between, and their creators and their shows [Olive Kitteridge was televised] tend to take more guff about it."

***

It's a bleak book in many ways. Olive is far from the only one fighting a mental indisposition of some kind. There's a lot of death, one way and another; and a lot of infidelity (though not by Olive or Henry, despite inclinations that might have led them in that direction).

It's also an unflinching look at aging. Physically, people go under. Henry spends a long time in his nursing-home, blind and fairly unresponsive, before eventually dying. Olive has suffered one heart attack, and fears another. Jim Kennison, the man she befriends after Henry's death, comes to her attention when she finds him keeled over on the river bank. And it's not just physical. It becomes more difficult to change: "You rode along in life a certain way, Olive thought... [Then you suddenly had to take some] different road, and you had to get used to that. But the mind, or the heart, she didn't know which one it was, but it was slower these days, not catching up, and she felt like a big, fat field mouse scrambling to get up on a ball that was right in front of her turning faster and faster, and she couldn't get her scratchy frantic limbs up onto it."

I think this blogger expresses the tenor of the book quite accurately: "More than stories, these are vignettes weaving a tapestry of senior life with its small town gossip, banal routines, simple joys and profound sorrows. If there is one overarching theme, it is loneliness... loneliness despite the presence of others. The reader is the voyeur who has a window into the unremarkable lives of these unremarkable people... On the surface, the residents lead a quiet life but delve deeper and you realize that the specter of death hangs over every story. Just like Olive, death is an omnipresent force that inserts itself insidiously in every story and in every uneventful life."

Very memorable writing. One of those books that makes you take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror.