Tom's Two Cents : Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again, by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout has just published a splendid sequel to her Pulitzer Prize winning OLIVE KITTERIDGE, titled, appropriately, OLIVE, AGAIN.  Neither book is a novel in the strict sense, rather both are collections of small town stories, thirteen to be exact, mostly set in the fictional(?) village of Crosby, Maine, overlooking the Atlantic.  The principal character, Olive Kitteridge, flits in and out of these stories, sometimes centrally, but often peripherally, as a minor character would.  Flowing around her is a mass of multi-cultural humanity: fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, widows, widowers, old people, young people, babies, crazies, “dopey-dopes.”  Olive dominates them all by sheer force of personality and bluntness.  She says what she thinks, she does what she wishes, and it’s pretty much “to hell” with the consequences.  As such a character, she is not always easy to identify with, but the person she becomes by the end of the sequel is quite human and even sympathetic.

I started reading the first book only last weekend and read straight through till Monday on my Kindle, then switched to hard copy, efficiently supplied by our great Library, in the middle of this past week.  Today, Saturday, I finished the sequel, having read some 500-600 pages in all, in story segments of some 15-25 pages.  It’s kind of nice to finish a chapter, especially when you are old and losing your power of recall, and not have to worry about the characters and their problems anymore, though there are exceptions, of course, mostly those members of Olive’s family, who put up with her and love her, despite everything.  But don’t get the notion that Olive is just an old sourpuss—far from it.  She is at times very funny, and her caustic humor spills out on herself as well.

You probably won’t like it all—I didn’t, because at times I found it too frank and tasteless and choppy, but the books, and observations, are terribly, at times brutally, honest, and reflective of the current uncivilized times we live in.  Strout is a very straightforward writer, at times seemingly simplistic, but highly insightful in her observations of human nature, and very readable in the best sense of the word.  If I were to sum up for you the multiple themes of these two books, it would be in one masterful sentence by Henry David Thoreau: “The mass of men [and women] lead lives of quiet desperation.”  Strout indubitably has her finger on the pulse of modern humanity!