OLIVE, AGAIN
By Elizabeth Strout
Patrick Melrose, the deeply troubled yet savagely witty character who was breathed into existence by the English author Edward St. Aubyn, seized readers’ attention in no less than five autobiographical novels, published between 1992 and 2012. Frank Bascombe, Richard Ford’s stoic and droll protagonist, propelled four of Ford’s books, beginning with “The Sportswriter” (1986) and ending with “Let Me Be Frank With You” (2014). And Albert Schmidt, Louis Begley’s aging, endearing snob, was the tonic who lent the fizz to “About Schmidt” and two subsequent novels from 1996 to 2012.
Readers, therefore, have every right to be treated to a second novel about another irascible yet sympathetic loner — but this time a headstrong woman. Olive Kitteridge, the deliciously funny and unforgettable miserabilist at the heart of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 novel that bore her name, fully deserves the sensitive and satisfying follow-up that Strout has written about her.
“Olive, Again,” a simple title that the matter-of-fact Olive would approve of, picks up not long after we left her in Strout’s first book of interrelated stories. This novel — which follows that same format — opens with the retired math teacher still living in the fictional coastal town of Crosby, Me. It’s a place where, on the surface, not much appears to happen, but there’s plenty going on behind the closed doors of the town’s old white clapboard and brick houses. Henry David Thoreau, were he to stroll through Crosby, would not recognize its Dunkin’ Donuts, yet he’d be familiar with the anguished Yankee souls at its booths pondering their lives of quiet desperation over coffee and crullers.
“Olive Kitteridge” ended with its title character embarking on an unlikely but tender relationship with Jack Kennison. It’s a sort of town-and-gown pairing. Olive is a grouchy local gossip who’s suspicious of outsiders, including someone who bears more than a slight resemblance to that occasional Mainer, President George W. Bush, “a born-again Christian with a cocaine addiction” and “stupid little eyes.” Jack, meanwhile, is an amused, extroverted and sometimes overbearing old-school Republican who taught at Harvard. Both have lost their spouses, and both, understandably, desire companionship — even if they’re equally turned off by each other. Jack, as readers might recall from “Olive Kitteridge,” is described by Olive as “a tall man with a big belly, slouching shoulders” and “a big flub-dub.” Olive, in Jack’s estimation, is not much of a catch either: “Tall, big; God, she was a strange woman.” Embracing her, he thinks, is like “kissing a barnacle-covered whale.”
Theirs is an on-off relationship, but in “Olive, Again,” Jack and Olive manage to evolve together. One of the strengths of Strout’s novel is that she realistically details the uncertainty and ambivalence, the revulsion and attraction, that these stubborn, no longer young people experience in each other’s company. “Go away, Jack,” Olive tells her new boyfriend when he enters the room she has slept in at his house. Her mind, though, seems to be saying something else: “Please, she thought. But she did not know what she meant by that. Please, she thought again. Please.”
In “Olive Kitteridge,” the novel’s hero, opinionated and cutting, often treated her husband, Henry, like a rain-soaked lobster shack doormat before his death; her anger, we find out, had a lot to do with her anguish and repressed love for an old, dearly departed flame, Jim O’Casey. In “Olive, Again,” we see a new side of Olive. Yes, Henry, an amiable pharmacist, was wide-eyed and clueless, but he was as dependably kindhearted as Fred Rogers. Why did Olive rebuff his neediness? “What crime had he been committing,” she wonders, “except to ask for her love?” Jack, too, can’t shake his own sorrow over the death of his spouse, Betsy. His feelings are complicated by bitter memories of her dalliance with a college friend (never mind that Jack was carrying on his own affair on the side).
In other words, Olive and Jack are entitled to a fresh start. One roots for them, then, to set aside their differences and get along. Ever empathic and intuitive, Strout delves into their begrudging romance: “During the night they would shift, but always they were holding each other, and Jack thought of their large old bodies, shipwrecked, thrown up upon the shore — and how they held on for dear life! He would never have imagined it. The Olive-ness of her, the neediness of himself.”
Jack isn’t the only man in Olive’s life who loves her — and who must put up with her. Her son, Christopher, who lives in New York, pays a visit to Olive with his family. Years earlier, his wife, Ann, had tried to call Olive “Mom,” and now she greets her mother-in-law with a perfunctory “Hello, Olive.” Relations between them have become as warm as Penobscot Bay in February. It’s sad, certainly, but Strout knows how to find the comic in the tragic. When Ann feeds her baby, old-fashioned Olive is aghast, even “a tiny bit ill” when confronted with “a breast — just sticking out in plain view, right there in the kitchen, the nipple large and dark.” There’s plenty more humor in other stories: In an early one, the monotony of a baby shower is broken up when Olive frantically delivers a baby in the back of her car (signaling her own rebirth, of sorts), and in another, she endures a meal at a trendy new spot called Gasoline (one imagines Olive, a green thumb, being fond of a no-fuss Olive Garden).
“Olive, Again” doesn’t presume that the reader is familiar with “Olive Kitteridge,” and occasionally clunky recaps bring newcomers up to speed. Like its precursor, “Olive, Again” tells of the lives of a host of characters beyond Olive. One story, “The End of the Civil War Days,” has a daughter gently break the news to her parents — living improbably divided lives in one house — that she’s the “star” of a documentary: “Well. O.K. Now, listen, you guys. I’m a dominatrix.” “Cleaning,” one of the most resonant and haunting stories in the book, explores a teenage girl’s sexual awakening and her newfound passion for the piano. The story, like all those in the book, is about people connecting, or trying to connect, or failing to connect.
Always on the periphery of these stories, if not at their center, is Olive. Some in Crosby view her simply as “that old bag,” but Strout, as in “Olive Kitteridge,” is exquisitely attuned to the subtleties of her beloved character’s innermost thoughts; she makes us feel for Olive, giving us an intimate, multifaceted and touching portrait of someone suffering alone. It turns out, too, that Olive, for all her irritability (“Oh Godfrey”) and her dismissiveness (“Phooey to you”), can actually be a softy, something of a largely unacknowledged guardian angel to townspeople. Checking in on a younger woman who is gravely ill, Olive offers these words of comfort: “You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is — we’re all just a few steps behind you.”
As cranky as she might be by nature, as gloomy as she is about her own failing health — wearing “diapers for old people … my foolish poopie panties” — and as the state of her town and the country grows more ominous, with depression and drug addiction taking their toll and “that horrible orange-haired man” occupying the White House, Olive Kitteridge is capable of looking past her solitude, her looming fate, and finding some solace and beauty in the world, as when she gazes out her window on a June day: “And so she sat, watching the sky, the clouds high up there, and she looked down then at the roses, which were pretty amazing after just one year. She leaned forward and peered at the rosebush — why, there was another bud coming right behind that bloom! Boy, did that make her happy, the sight of that new fresh rosebud.”
