Short Story Sunday: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy.

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout is a short story anthology for people who don't like short stories. One complaint I often hear against short stories is that they don't fully satisfy the reader's desire to know; they whet your appetite and are over so soon that many readers don't think they are worth the effort. I don't agree, but I do understand. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning "novel" may be the antidote some non-short-story-reading readers need, an anthology with training wheels.

The stories in Olive Kitteridge are all linked in that they all share a common character. In just over half of the stories Olive Kitteridge is the main character, though she is never the narrator. In others she is a supporting character and in a few she makes only a brief cameo appearance, but she is in every one. All of the stories are set in small town Maine, Crosby, where Olive and her pharmacist husband live their lives and raise their one child, a son, who they hope will continue to live nearby and raise grandchildren in the house they have built for him. Of course, things do not go as planned. Olive's husband suffers a stroke and is confined to a nursing home, her son moves to California and then to New York where he becomes estranged from Olive, and Olive is forced to face the final years of her life alone. But it's not a sad story, not at all. Olive won't let anyone feel sorry for her, not really. She wants no one's pity, not even the readers. She is a very strong woman, the teacher all the children at the middle school where she taught math were afraid of. She cares little what people think of her and has never apologized for anything in her life, nor ever felt she had reason to. She is a difficult woman, but she is a wondeful character. The more the reader knows her the more the reader wants to know about her. But the thing is, the reader is the only one who truly knows her; none of the other characters, not even Olive really, see her well enough to understand why she is the way she is and to appreciate her for all she has done.

Olive Kitteridge can be read as a novel, but if you read novels solely for their plots you may end up disappointed. There is a plot arc to the collection, a compelling one, but Olive Kitteridge is much more about character than it is about plot. By the end, the reader knows Olive inside and out. The stories that focus on her let us see what she thinks about herself, the people she knows and the people she loves, and about the things that have happened to her throughout her life. She is always honest with herself, she just doesn't always understand her affect on those around her. The stories that do not focus on her let us see what the other people in her life think of her, from her husband who has remained devoted to her for so many years to townspeople who barely have a passing acquaintance with her.

It is through these other stories, the ones in which Olive plays only a passing role, that Olive Kitteridge becomes much more than the portrait of one woman--it becomes the portrait of a town. I was reminded of Sherwood Anderson's collection Winesburg, Ohio which features stories all set in a single town, some that share an occasional character as I recall. Anderson's collection is sometimes called a grotesque because so many of its stories feature isolated characters, haunted by destructive desires. "Hands," is a classic example. Anderson's wonderful collection drives home the sense of isolation so many people in small towns feel, and Ms. Strout's book covers much of this same territory, but where Anderson leaves the reader thinking the only thing to do is leave town, Olive Kitteridge is life affirming and, in the end, small town affirming as well. I never wanted to visit Winesburg, but I would like to spend more time with the people in Ms. Strout's town of Crosby, Maine. I hope there are more stories of life in Crosby to come, maybe even another novel, and maybe Olive Kitteridge herself can make an appearance or two.

If you'd like to join Short Story Sunday please feel free to use Mr. Linky below. As an added incentive, this month I'm giving away my slightly worn copy of Olive Kitteridge. As usual, all followers will be entered, but everyone who leaves a link to a review on their blog will receive five entries. Enter by June 29, that gives you an extra day. Dakota will be selecting the winner at random on Tuesday, June 30.