Book Review: Olive Kitteridge.

Olive Kitteridge: A Novel in Stories by Elizabeth Strout


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Let me begin by saying that a score of three out of five stars might be lower than Olive Kitteridge actually deserves, but as a winner of the Pulitzer, I might be holding it to a higher standard than I would most other books. The past few Pulitzer Prize-winners that I have read (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Known World, The Amazing Adventures of Kavelier and Clay, The Road and others) have all been excellent. Olive Kitteridge was, in my estimation, a cut below those others.

The "novel" is actually a series of stories involving the denizens of a small town in Maine. The main character, Olive Kitteridge, appears in each story. In some, she is the central character, in others, she appears only briefly, as is the case with "The Piano Player," in which she enters a restaurant, waves to the pianist, and then disappears from the story.

The writing is - as you would expect - excellent. The prose is clear and the details and observations are astute. The characters, likewise, are believable and expertly drawn.

Throughout the course of the novel, we see Olive suffer personal loss: a son who fails to meet her (unreasonable) expectations for him, a husband who she treats cruelly for decades only to realize how much she cares about him after he suffers a stroke which leaves him in a vegetative condition, as well as numerous personal feuds. She is sometimes petty, sometimes kind and noble-spirited. She is brutal in her honesty with others and in complete denial with herself. In fact, the picture painted is fairly bleak. In the final chapter, Olive seems to experience some sort of hope for the future; however, it is implied that she will die soon and will have, in the end, lived a largely joyless and petty life.

My problem with this novel is largely an ideological one. This novel seems to paint a picture of a world in which every smile is actually a mask to cover some unrelenting sadness and every promise is insincere. Literally every married couple in the novel is involved in an affair and every parent is a petty and manipulative puppet-master, pulling the strings of their children's lives. While I understand that these things happen and that every person alive experiences sorrow - it may even be the case that the sorrows outnumber the joys - the tone of this book amounts to little more than a bromide: bad things can happen to anyone at any time. To convince people that life is hard is a trivial task; everyone knows that this is the case. The central thematic idea of the novel is simply not one which merits a novel's-worth of exploration.

So, read this book for the wonderfully-crafted characters and for the pitch-perfect prose. But thematically, expect to get hammered over the head with bad-things-happen-and-it-is-very-literary-when-they-do.

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Questions for Discussion:

1. Have you read the book? If so, what did you think of it?
2. Are you getting tired of book reviews? (I hope not, because I have a few more books to review, and I'm reading them faster than I'm writing reviews for them!)