by
Elizabeth Strout
I found this a fine and luminous effort of modern American fiction. Set in a small coastal town in Maine, it offers us a sensitive, penetrating portrayal of some of its inhabitants as they intermingle and go about their daily lives. The central character, Olive Kitteridge, is an astringent, prim and proper retired seventh-grade mathematics teacher with a “big intelligent face”, a no-nonsense woman married to a pharmacist, Henry. She has plans for them both and for her son, Christopher.
Life plays her an unexpected hand: Christopher, who is the local podiatrist, leaves for California with Suzanne, a woman from out of town, and when the quiet, hardworking, all-too-ready to please Henry suffers a massive a stroke, Olive is alone. We watch as she struggles to face the conditions of her life. Her aging loneliness grows, filing the habitual places. A catastrophic visit to her son sends her flying, bewildered, back to an empty home. She yearns; her youthful dreams remain to love and be loved.
Then Jack Kennison crosses her path, and while it appears that they have nothing in common, she in time gently and caringly comes to lie beside him. “And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union — what pieces life took out of you.”
Worthy winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this exquisite, sad, humorous piece of writing left me wondering about the indomitable, fragile Olive long after I had turned the final page.
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