Olive Kitteridge Makes the Ordinary Extraordinary

You may think that the lives of residents in a small town in Maine would make for a dull novel, but reading Olive Kitteridge will disabuse you of that notion. In the 13 short stories that make up Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout vividly brings to life the love, drama, and heartbreak hiding behind the doors of a nondescript coastal town.

Each story features a different family, but Olive Kitteridge, an ornery math teacher, appears every time, sometimes as a distant glimpse and others as a main character.  We first see through the eyes of her husband Henry whose steadfast love of his cantankerous wife is at times nothing short of heroic (or as Olive would probably say, "simple-minded.") Strout's use of dialogue in this chapter is an extremely effective tool in developing the characters and revealing their relationship. Through quick dialog exchanges such as,
"'Not keen on it,' Olive said, when he suggested they have the young couple over for dinner,"
the reader gets great insight about their dynamic as a couple. Over the course of the book, we see the marriage evolve, and get to a stage that Henry lyrically describes as, "It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert."

We later see Olive through the eyes of her students, some of whom saw her as terrifying and others as enlightened. We also see her through the eyes of friends and acquaintance, some who despise her and others who are amused by her frank comments and lack of patience.

Each short story is beautifully written, propelling the reader deep into the difficult situations of families in Crosby, Maine. Some chapters are painful to read, filled with heartbreak, poverty and disappointment but the prose was so hauntingly beautiful that I couldn't help but keep on reading. Even though Olive Kitteridge's narrative receives the satisfaction of an ending, I was left with the same frustration I feel after reading any short story, wondering what happened to all those vivid characters, from Kevin Coulson and his interrupted suicide to brave Julie Harwood who ran away from the crippling control of her mother.

Olive Kitteridge is a mosaic of disfunctional families, depression, loneliness, and alcoholism, but it's underlying message is a promise of love, hope, and forgiveness. Olive herself concludes, "Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden, surging greediness for life. ... She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed."

Olive Kitteridge is a dense, little book, filled with gorgeous sentences that will flutter in your subconscious long after you've put it down. It is chock-full of material for book clubs to discuss, easily enough for two nights of debate. You'll be tempted to underline passages, ear-mark pages, and read sections aloud to others. Elizabeth Strout created an ordinary woman and then made her sublime through her skilled prose. It's no wonder it won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.