After reading the first of the 13 stories in Elizabeth Strout's "Olive Kitteridge," I wasn't sure I was going to like this book. How can you like a novel if you can't like, or at least relate to, its protagonist? I was barely into the second story when I started grumbling to myself that this book was too depressing. Olive was just a mean old lady who knew a lot of people who died. Maybe I didn't want to like this book because of the prominent Oprah quote on the cover, or because it's one of those books "everybody" likes. But I kept reading, and at the end of the second story, I knew this book was unlike anything I've ever read. Olive isn't just a mean old lady. She's something completely different to every person she encounters. She's an angel, a fuddy-duddy, a wife who doesn't appreciate her husband, a stern mother. Or is she? Each of these stories reveals a new side of Olive through the eyes of her fellow townspeople.
Pharmacy
The book's opening story gives us some background on Olive's marriage. The focus is on Henry, a pharmacist who watches his way of life mold to uncontrollable circumstances in the progression of modernity. The story alternates between the "good old days" and the "we're getting old" days, and we find that Henry is a gentle, naive soul who just wants everyone to be happy. His reliable old assistant is replaced by a newly married young girl, and Olive teases him that he has a new girlfriend. Denise is sweet and Henry admits only to himself that he is intrigued by her. She ends up leaning on him quite a bit when her husband is killed in a hunting accident, but she later remarries and moves away. Henry's pharmacy is replaced by a brightly lit chain drugstore. "People are never as helpless as you think they are," Olive tells her husband. Denise sends Henry greeting cards for years to come.
Incoming Tide
Wondering why I should care about this woman, Olive, and why she hasn't yet appeared in the second story, I begin to make notes in my book to mark things I don't like. I feel the book is too depressing, and unnecessarily descriptive passages are putting me to sleep: "He squinted hard toward the ocean. Great gray clouds were blowing in, and yet the sun, as though in contest, streamed yellow rays beneath them so that parts of the water sparkled with frenzied gaiety."
But I want to find out: Does Kevin commit suicide at the end? His mother did as much when he was younger, and he left town. Now he has returned to follow in her footsteps. He parks by the water and is approached by Olive Kitteridge, his former teacher who knows of his past and wants to empathize. I get annoyed when the author spells out what should be implied: "It was always sad, the way the world was going. And always a new age dawning." But I appreciate observations on New York: "...he had thought more and more how provincial New Yorkers were, and how they didn't know it." And I give in to the blatant explanations: "He missed his mother. ... But this turbulence in him was torture." He's turbulent like the waves, see?
He is saved from his rising surf when he literally jumps out of the car and into the water to save a woman from drowning. She clutches him more tightly than he thought possible, and he is inspired: "...oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on." I don't want to like this, but I love it.
The Piano Player
Angie has played piano in the cocktail lounge for years. She is highly cognizant of her stage fright and relies on vodka to get her through it, to get her to that place where she is alive only inside the music. "...when she played, it was like being a sculptress, she thought, pulling at the lovely thick clay." I can hear the jazzy lounge piano in my head while the author reveals Angie's secrets, and we see Olive and Henry enter. Olive is grouchy, Henry is a breath of fresh air. But our focus remains with Angie, who spies in the crowd a former lover. Simon comes to talk to her, to make himself feel a little better about the life he doesn't love. He's married with children, and Angie hasn't changed. He stabs her with a dull knife of knowledge: Angie's prostitute mother had once sought him out in desperation. That night, Angie decides to stop seeing Malcolm, her married lover, and tells him so. He's angry, but he doesn't hurt her. She has friends. "A face like an angel. A drunk." She thinks of her mother, paralyzed and thin and cared for by attendants who are rough and leave bruises on her frail arms. Tomorrow Angie will mention this to someone kind.
A Little Burst
In the most humorous of the first five stories, we get a glimpse of Olive as a mother. Her son, Christopher is marrying at 38. He's known his wife only a short time, and the reception is being held at the home he and his parents built for him. The author describes Olive "[w]edging her paper napkin into the slats of the picnic table," and I realize that all the little details that had been putting me to sleep are there to help me out. Each story is in a vastly different setting with new characters, so being able to visualize seemingly unimportant details serves to ease the reader's transition into and grasp on the current moment.
Olive isn't fond of her son's bride, or that bride's mother, for that matter. "Don't I hate a grown woman who says 'the little girls' room.' Is she drunk?" Olive is tired of the company and ready to go home and take a nap. She siestas in the master bedroom while Henry says his long goodbyes, and she overhears tidbits of the bride's conversation with a friend. She hears enough to know her dress is insulted and her husband adored. She also hears Suzanne refer to Chris as having had a "hard time," with no explanation. Depression runs in the family, but Olive has taken care of her son. She has loved him. Olive is enraged by the know-it-all bride, and she decides to steal a shoe and a bra from the room, and to draw a magic-marker line down the sleeve of a sweater she knows won't be worn for months. Just to show "Dr. Sue" that she doesn't know everything. "Of course, right now their sex life is probably very exciting, and they undoubtedly think that will last, the way new couples do. They think they're finished with loneliness, too."
Olive knows her body is wearing out, and she believes that her soul is, too. She progresses day to day on the lookout for "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are obvious, but little bursts can be just as fun. Like stealing a shoe from your daughter-in-law to "keep the self-doubt alive." She figures it's a better solution to life's potential emptiness than her husband's method: "He is an innocent. It's how he has learned to get through life." He prefers his bursts slow and gradual, and not a bit bursting. And just like that, I was fond of Olive.
Starving
Harmon is the owner of the hardware store. His wife, Bonnie, is increasingly distant, so he begins having Sunday rendezvous with Daisy Foster, a widow. "His brief Sunday moments with Daisy were not untender, but it was more a shared interest, like bird watching." He doesn't understand what's happening till he hears a local young couple use the phrase "fuck buddies." Appalled, he halts his sexual activity with Daisy, but continues to bring her a doughnut each week, and they start talking.
The young couple Harmon has been observing starts to have problems. They're busted for smoking pot and kicked out of their apartment. The boy leaves town, and the girl, Nina, loses her cinnamon (doughnut) complexion while giving in deeply to her anorexia. In need of a bed, she ends up staying briefly at Daisy's. When Harmon comes over, he stays longer than usual, talking with the girl. Olive arrives on her Red Cross collection rounds, and a mini-intervention takes place. Olive tries to reach out, telling Nina that we're all "starving" for something, but the girl sarcastically rejects the comment, bringing Olive to tears. "I don't know who you are, but young lady, you're breaking my heart." The conversation continues, and Harmon senses a strange energy, "something astonishing and unworldly," in the room. Nina goes home to her family, who keep Daisy updated on her illness.
Harmon feels his marriage unraveling as he is drawn nearer to Daisy. News arrives that Nina has died of a heart attack, and Harmon realizes he wants more from life than a quarter in mud puddle. He professes his love to Daisy, and rents out the room Nina had shared with her boyfriend.
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The morals of the book are unfolding beautifully, and I can see the merit a book like this will have in classrooms and book clubs. I could probably devote an exorbitant number of blog posts to answering the questions in the reader's guide. Every person has to find his or her own way to "get through life." Death is imminent, but the way you live is so important because it's all we have. Olive's "little bursts" are the silver linings of her life, and they're no different from Harmon's quarter in the mud puddle. It's no hundred-dollar bill, but it sure might come in handy.
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