More by Elizabeth Strout

Olive, Again     Elizabeth Strout     (2019)

Olive is back, and you won’t want to miss her return.

Elizabeth Strout, the queen of linked short stories, has produced a sequel that matches or exceeds her Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge of 2008. In thirteen succinct stories, each of which can absolutely stand alone, Strout unpeels life in the fictional rural town of Crosby, Maine. The crusty, candid Olive—a character in most of the stories—is sometimes intolerant and cranky but often kind. When her kindness is awkwardly expressed and causes offense, she’s surprised, and she tries to rectify her behavior. She’s mellowed as she’s aged.

The other characters in Olive, Again are townspeople whom Olive interacts with in some way. Their lives are intertwined with each other and with the inevitable sadnesses and transgressions and occasional triumphs of living on this Earth. There’s unfaithfulness, pedophilia, disease, and death (especially by suicide) aplenty. The surroundings of the town can reflect the despair of the inhabitants:

• “Around them a sudden gust of wind sent a few twigs swirling, and muddy plastic bag that had been run over a number of times rose slightly, then dropped back to the ground among slushy car tracks from the old snow.”(120)

• “As Denny approached the river, and could see in the moonlight how the river was moving quickly, he felt as though his life had been a piece of bark on that river, just going along, not thinking at all. Headed toward the waterfall.” (142)

Yet it’s not all bleakness. Strout's characters can also connect with the natural world in a way that lifts their spirits, if only briefly:

• “The field was darkening, the trees behind it were like pieces of black canvas, but the sky still sent down the sun, which sliced gently across the grass on the far end of the field.” (17)

The stories, which take place the very recent past, span more than a decade of Olive’s retirement from her school-teaching job. Early in the book, when she’s still mourning the loss of her husband, she marries for a second time. I was shocked by this plot development, not the least because Olive did not seem to me like someone who’d be considered a prize mate. I could hear Strout gently chiding me for my belittling thought. Though Olive doesn’t possess physical beauty and can be irksome in her bluntness, she is unfailingly honest. Honesty is a rare trait, and her second husband recognizes this.

Please read this book. It will open your eyes to components of the human condition that you’ve never thought about before. 

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I’ve reviewed two other excellent Strout linked-story novels: My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and its sequel, Anything is Possible (2017), set in New York City and rural Illinois respectively.

Short Stories & Essays: 2 Reviews

Calypso     David Sedaris     (2018)

Any book of essays and stories by David Sedaris is guaranteed to elicit out-loud guffaws from me as I burn through the pages. Calypso is no exception, even though several of the pieces in this collection center on the 2013 suicide of Sedaris’s sister Tiffany. Sedaris depicts himself, his four surviving siblings, and his elderly father as truly grieved by the loss of Tiffany. But they carry on, recalling their decades of interactions with Tiffany in raw spurts that are sometimes amusing and sometimes downright sad. “Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story . . . Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.” (91-92)

Over the years, Sedaris has lived in several cities in the United States and in France. He currently resides with his long-term boyfriend, the visual artist Hugh Hamrick, in a renovated sixteenth-century house in the south of England. Incidents set in this home and in the surrounding countryside display Sedaris’s acute sense of cultural nuance. If you’ve never read Sedaris before, be warned that he’s an inveterate trash collector—as in self-appointed roadside litter gleaner—who describes vividly the sordid garbage that he picks up. He’s also a prolific writer, whose other books are reviewed in my overview of his work.

Cockfosters     Helen Simpson     (2015)  

Reviewers of this book of short stories set in contemporary England have pointed to the theme of aging and the observations of characters, middle-aged and beyond, who have a trove of wisdom as well as a sense of losing a grasp on life. This is certainly one theme, but another theme, trenchantly pursued, is women’s role in society and in the home. Each story is named for a place that figures either directly or tangentially in the action. In the title story, two old friends travel by train to Cockfosters station, the end of the line, to retrieve a pair of eyeglasses that one of them has left behind. Each stop along the way brings up discussion of evolving British culture. In the story “Arizona,” a woman receiving an acupuncture treatment has a wide-ranging conversation with her acupuncturist, including a comparison of menopause to the state of Arizona. Most of the stories are brief and pointed; Simpson is especially adept with hyperbolic satire, as in “Erewhon” and “Moscow.” 

Only one story, “Berlin,” left me flat. In it, a husband and wife are reluctant audience members for a multi-day performance of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Apparently, the two are sorting out whether they want to stay together, but there is little discussion of their troubles. Instead, readers  get interminable descriptions of the opera action. If I was supposed to match this action to the couple’s experiences, I missed the boat. I may have been hampered here by my utter contempt for Wagnerian opera.