Olive Kitteridge: Not a Nice Person

Elizabeth Strout’s 2009 Pulitzer-winner Olive Kitteridge is a marvelous work of fiction, an unusual hybrid that might be called a collection of linked short stories or a story cycle. Linked story collections go back a long way. Think of Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

Strout’s 13 stories focus on people in a small town in coastal Maine. In that way the book suggests James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), a classic of the modern short story form, or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1925). But in the way Strout zooms in and out on a central character the book is closer to Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories.

Olive Kitteridge appears in all 13 stories, often as a minor character in the background, occasionally as the protagonist. In the opener, “Pharmacy,” Olive’s pharmacist husband Henry is the central consciousness, and we first see Olive as his difficult wife. In the second story “Incoming Tide,” Olive, who once taught seventh grade, plays a prominent role, but the protagonist is a depressive young man, one of her former students.

It is not until “A Little Burst,” the fourth story, that Olive takes center stage. The occasion is the wedding of her son Chris. Olive, feeling worn out by the socializing and not in a good mood because of her visceral doubts about the bride, retreats to lie down in a bedroom. What follows is a paragraph that captures her in miniature:

“Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can’t stand the blah-blah-blah. And they’d just as soon blah-blah-blah about you when your back is turned. ‘Never trust folks,’ Olive’s mother told her years ago, after someone left a basket of cow flaps by their front door. Henry got irritated by that way of thinking. But Henry was pretty irritating himself, with his steadfast way of remaining naive, as though life were just what a Sears catalogue told you it was: everyone standing around smiling.”

Note Olive’s projection of her own character onto her son, her suspicion of social niceties, and her characteristic state of irritation. When my wife’s book club, all women, discussed this book, most of the members disliked Olive intensely.

“She isn’t a nice person,” New York Times reviewer Louisa Thomas wrote about Olive. “As one of the town’s older women notes, ‘Olive had a way about her that was absolutely without apology.’ Olive’s son puts it more bluntly. ‘You can make people feel terrible,’ he tells her. She dismisses others with words like ‘hellion’ and ‘moron’ and ‘flub-dub.’ After swapping discontents, she says to a friend, ‘Always nice to hear other people’s problems.’”

But I think Olive is a grand character. She’s a big woman, physically and emotionally – angry, blunt, stoic, intensely caring, donut-eating. While not always very self-aware, she’s always a fully rounded human. That’s what I love about Olive. Like John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom, she’s a fictional character with all the flaws, hopes, and out-of-control emotions that we humans are born to.

Do I like her? Absolutely. You will too – if you prefer to have few illusions and appreciate songwriter Leonard Cohen’s lines: “There is a hole in everything./That’s how the light gets in.”

So why did Strout write about Olive in this linked-story format? Why not a straight-up novel? The title, Olive Kitteridge, certainly implies a novel.

“I chose to use this form primarily because I envisioned the power of Olive’s character as best told in an episodic manner,” Elizabeth Strout said in an interview. “I thought the reader might need a little break from her at times, as well. ….Besides, I also love point of view, and I thought it would be interesting for the reader to see [her] from different sets of eyes in the community.”

Authors are not always the most reliable guides to their own work, but I buy what Strout is saying here. Olive is like anchovies on pizza, best parceled out in bits, even for those who like anchovies.

And as Strout says, the community is important. It helps us understand Olive to see her in the context of the other aging married couples and struggling young adults in this Maine town. The book is about the deep, quiet drama of ordinary life – a little like what Joyce did in Ulysses. It suggests that these backwater Maine lives – Olive’s among them – generate epic emotions. That they matter.

The book also reminded me of John O’Hara’s novella Appointment in Samarra (1934) – small-town horizons, rigid social structures, grim truths revealed. But the difference is instructive. O’Hara’s novel drives toward
an unrelenting climax relentlessly foreshadowed. The plot mechanism gets in the way of the story’s authenticity; the author’s manipulation to a denouement is too visible.

So perhaps a third reason for the unusual form is that it enables Strout to give her readers credible snapshots of reality. Each story, of course, has a plot, but taken together, they add up to a pointillist portrait of the town and of Olive. There are no privileged authorial forces, no portentous plot wheels driving to conclusion in Olive Kitteridge, just us humans.