Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

It's not fair!

A line we learn to say with a pout as toddlers; scream in frustrated rage as teenagers and finally get to understand in full murky depth in our later years.

This book could easily be re-titled: The unfairness of life, as witnessed (and contributed to) by Olive Kitteridge. It's a collection of stories linked by Olive's hefty presence as she goes about her life in a small coastal town in Maine.

Olive is without doubt a difficult woman, who ought to live alone with nothing but a doughnut for company, but instead she is married to Henry who is the nicest man in town and shows her nothing but love. He is a pharmacist who could have taught Dale Carnegie how to win friends and influence people and all Olive can see is a man who is soft in the middle and far too tolerant of dim-witted people. What does he ever see in her?

Each of the chapters introduces a different set of people with their own troubles and conflicted loyalties and in most cases the good people are the ones that come off worse. (Ok, so that's a little spoiler but you have had 14 years to read this!) Does Elizabeth Strout mean us to question the worth of being sweet natured and kind? In the end, Olive doesn't get everything her own way and her answer to that is to become more bad tempered and isolated. Does she end up alone and miserable? No. Is that fair? Probably not.

Comments

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