Elizabeth Strout, OLIVE AGAIN

As with the first book of this pair, OLIVE KITTERIDGE, the format is not a typical novel. It's a series of vignettes, all told in third person, centered upon different people in the small town of Crosby, Maine. The outspoken, complex Olive figures in many but not all stories, and perhaps because this form is the same as the first book, I didn't find this book as fresh and original. However, there are elements in Strout's writing that I particularly admire and love. The first is the way she places us in a scene and in a character's subjectivity with extraordinary economy. Here's the first line (which caused me writer envy): "In the early afternoon on a Saturday in June, Jack Kennison put on his sunglasses, got into his sports car with the top down, strapped the seatbelt across his large stomach, and drove to Portland--almost an hour away--to buy a gallon of whiskey rather than bump into Olive Kitteridge at the grocery store here in Crosby, Maine." One sentence and we have place, two people, an intense emotion (wanting to avoid), some insight into Jack's circumstances, and a sense that we are in the hands of an observant, wry, humorous narrator. The second thing I love is that Strout shows us the disparity between two people's interpretations of the same event; that's part of the point of the book, I think, and is enabled by this structure. For example, Jack can't remember the name of a woman he met in the grocery store; Olive saw them together and felt jealous. Third, she doesn't shy away from some of our deepest feelings--shame, love, fear of death, a longing for connection. She homes in on these small moments of belated understanding--when, for example, a character realizes that he had, as a child, accepted the derogatory name "Frenchie" without much thought, but in fact it probably hurt him even then, at some level. And--again, economically--she shows characters at particular pivotal moments, laying bare the uncertainty as they face a new truth. Here's Jack: "What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. It caused him to feel an inner trembling, and he could not find the worlds ... there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. it meant that he did not understand ... how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself." An enjoyable read, full of humor, compassion, and humanity.