Showing posts with label Elizabeth Strout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elizabeth Strout. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again only confirms her as one of my favorite contemporary writers of literary fiction.

The temperamental Olive in her later decades demonstrates qualities that only come with experience and self-reflection, enabling her to be an instrument of grace to others. She is still a straight-shooter who sees things unvarnished, her truthfulness sometimes abrasive.

The stories in this book revisit characters from Strout's fictional world of Crosby, Maine. 

This was a hard story to read. At age 67, my husband and I have undergone several surgeries this year. I am all too aware of the brevity of life and how we allow ourselves to be propelled through the years impassively until some change in our abilities stops us up short. We reconsider our mistakes; our view of the past and its relationships become torqued with new understanding. We wonder how we could have allowed love to become a battleground, fear to fence us from our dreams. We become invisible, an unwanted portend to others of their own inevitable future. We recognize that we are strangers to each other--and are incomprehensible even to ourselves.

What kind of life can we live in these ever-shortening days? The answer is in the line that had me in tears: "I think our job--maybe even our duty--is to--" Her voice became calm, adultlike. "To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can."

Life is a mystery. People are a mystery. There are no answers, no easy to follow instructions to guarantee success and happiness. 

Like Ranier Maria Rilke wrote in his Letters to a Young Poet, we must "be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked doors and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."*

I don't know if Olive's story is completed. And I am not sure I want to follow her to her end. It's all too close to home. Strout is a fearless writer who dares to confront us with things that disturb our equilibrium. We recognize ourselves in her characters. 

I read a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.



Olive, Again
by Elizabeth Strout
Random House Publishing Group - Random House
Pub Date 15 Oct 2019
ISBN 9780812996548
PRICE $27.00 (USD)

* excerpted from Letters to a Young Poet by Ranier Maria Rilke, translation by M. D. Herter Norton, W. W. Norton & Company

Thursday, September 21, 2017

Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout

"I wonder if we are all condemned to live outside the grace of God." Reverent Tyler Caskey in Abide with Me.
I have long wanted to read Elizabeth Strout's second novel Abide with Me , ever since I first heard about it. Strout has been one of my favorite authors since Olive Kitteridge was being passed around a group of reading church friends ten years ago. I was lucky to review galleys of My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible. 

Abide by Me drew me in particular because it is about a minister in crisis whose congregation turns on him when he is most vulnerable. It tests the faith of Reverend Tyler Caskey and that of his church in West Annett, MA.

My husband is a retired clergyman and I saw close up the parsonage experience and the blessings and burdens congregations can be to their spiritual leaders. Strout has a wise understanding of human nature, and it is evident in this book.

Set in the late 1950s, the novel begins with Tyler deep in depression two years after his wife died of cancer, caring for his equally depressed oldest daughter while his mother has taken over his youngest daughter to raise.

"Life, he would think. How mysterious and magnificent, such abundance!" 

Tyler's wife Lauren had lit the room with joy. He marveled how he had been so lucky to be loved by this woman. They married while he was at seminary. And if she was no stereotype of a pastor's wife, Tyler accepted her for who she was. In fact she was the direct opposite of what people expect a pastor's wife to be: Lauren was fashionable and pretty; she loved to gossip and shop and hated the "grim politeness" of the church women; and she had no interest in prayers or even religion. She said, "my God," and dressed wrong, and could not understand why the country roads had no road signs so people could find their way around. (I felt the same way about the lack of road signs when we were at small town church!)

The church had inherited a shabby farm house and sold the more valuable town parsonage, leaving the isolated and decrepit house for their pastor. I shuddered, how cold a thing to do, and yet how typical. It was 'good enough' for the pastor; after all he got free housing, he should be grateful. I know those 'good enough', hand-me-down, low grade, cheap fulfillment of obligations, always with the excuse that the church has no money, even when the parishioners live far better. A man of God and his wife ought to be humble and unworldly!

When Lauren sees the parsonage she cries. Oh, boy, I got that. I once cried too, seeing a run down, small, badly placed house we were to live in after enjoying nine years in a beautiful, well maintained parsonage in one of the best neighborhoods.

Relegated to the smelly and depressing house, Lauren asks to paint the living room and dining room pink. Then the children came, and she loved them dearly, but she hated the lack of money and ran up big credit bills. She missed television and girl friends and having fun, and became petulant and distant towards Tyler.

Hints are dropped about Lauren's past, how she hated her father who used to bathe her and her friends, and how her mother commented that Lauren was wild and unpredictable and they were happy to see her married. Lauren tells her one confidant that she had many beaus before Tyler.

Lauren did not accept cancer and the inevitable early death, but was angry and lashed out. She never liked the church-funded housekeeper, Connie, and banned her from the house.

Tyler liked Connie's quiet demeanor. After Lauren' death, Connie becomes important to Tyler, who depends on her to keep the house going. He has lost his joy and is just going through the motions. He fails his daughter Katheryn, who stops talking and acts out in school, her hair always knotted and unbrushed. Her teacher actually hates the child. Meanwhile, Tyler's mother is pushing a woman upon him and holds his youngest daughter hostage.

Tyler is humble and determined to be meek and always above personal feelings and bias. Women in the church turn against Tyler, feeling slighted by his lack of attention and safe distance from church politics. Connie turns up missing, accused of theft, and the rumor network starts buzzing that Tyler and Connie were involved. The people turn vicious. And I have experienced what it is like when congregants talk about the pastor behind closed doors, and stare coldly at him in public, feeling righteous, judging and unaware of their own sin in judging.

When Tyler finds Connie, she confesses acts which she has done out of love but which are considered heinous by social and moral law. Tyler has also been struggling with guilt. He forgives Connie. Can he forgive himself?

"They need to go after someone, especially when they sniff weakness under what's supposed to be strong," Tyler is told.

When Tyler reaches the end of his rope and can no longer pretend he is in control, grace comes in unexpected ways.

In the Notes, Strout says she was interested in story, not theology: how does on live life? Does it matter how one lives?  "I can only hope that readers will not only be entertained by the stories I tell, but be moved to reckon with their own sense of mystery and awe," Strout ends. "Through the telling of stories and the reading of stories, we have a chance to see something about ourselves and others that maybe we knew, but didn't know we knew. We can wonder for a moment, if, for all our separate histories, we are not more alike than different after all."

And that I what I adore about reading Strout, that connection that she offers with love and sensitivity, the universal human experience of wounded people discovering how to live.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout: Hope for the Hopeless

"But this was life! And it was messy!"
After Elizabeth Strout wrote My Name is Lucy Barton she was moved to tell the stories of the hometown characters Lucy and her mother had talked about, resulting in Anything is Possible.

In Strout's prize-winning book Olive Kitteridge each character is touched by Olive; in Anything is Possible it is Lucy Barton who provides the context for each story.

The suffering behind the stories made my heart ache. Poverty, abuse, deep loneliness, and loveless lives have left their marks on these characters. And yet--and yet--their resilience is rewarded with moments of grace, a nod of understanding, friendship offered unexpected--the small gifts that shed a ray of hope that life can be different.

As I was reading Strout I was also reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I noted similarities between the books: crushing childhood poverty, resilience, and an understanding that being truthful about life isn't pretty.

Lucy's sister Vicky asks Lucy why she doesn't write the truth of what happened to their family. Who'd want to read that story? their brother Pete asks. I would, Vicky replies. I was reminded of a scene from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie's teacher tells Francie to write pretty stories, not stories about drunkenness and poverty, the stories of Francie's real life. The question always is, do writers tell the truth or 'pretty' life up? Strout has decided that life is messy, and yet, as Pete tells Vicky, we don't turn out so bad in spite of it.

It is Strout's honesty that is unsettling and moving. By entering these character's lives we learn compassion. We walk in their shoes for a while and they become more than a recluse, or a fat lady, or the poor kids who ate from dumpsters.

The best part is the compassion these characters have for each other. Lucy's brother Pete remarks that their mother 'just wasn't made right,' and Lucy agrees but adds, "She had grit. She hung in there."

At a time when Americans are trying to understand the force behind popularism and the political climate, we are turning to literature to understand the experiences of those who are from different backgrounds. Forget some of the over-marketed best sellers. Read Strout.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Anything is Possible
Elizabeth Strout
Random House
Publication date: April 25, 2017
$27 hardcover
ISBN: 9780812989403

"Radiant...Class prejudice remains one of Strout's enduring themes along with the complex, fraught bonds of family across the generations...Another powerful examination of painfully human ambiguities and ambivalences--this gifted writer just keeps getting better." Kirkus Reviews


Sunday, January 3, 2016

This is a Story About Love: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

Recently I was at a local college production of Thorton Wilder's play Our Town. I have seen it many times. It always moves me to tears. During the intermission the lady seated next to me leaned over and remarked, "This is the play where nothing happens."

What is a life? We are born. We grow up. We fall in love. Or don't fall in love. Or no one falls in love with us. We may or may not have children. We likely will work, for pay or as part of our obligation to the family. We die. Same old, same old, generation after generation. There is nothing new under the sun.

I once read in a biography of Jane Austen that she had led a life in which nothing happened. I bristled. Jane's brothers went to sea during war! Her father died and the family lost their financial security, their home. Her sister's love died. Jane suffered a debilitating disease that caused her death. She was a published, female author in her lifetime.

Nothing happened. Same old, same old.

Every life has a story, and that story is immensely important to the person living it. The wonder is that a novelist can create a fictional character with an ordinary life, and strip away the prejudices that tell us nothing happened, and reveal something universal and informative about 'the human condition,' that teaches us how to better live.

My Name is Lucy Barton is a small book of 131 pages. Lucy addresses the reader, relating the story of her hospitalization when her estranged mother spent five days with her. Her mother talked about the people in the rural town where Lucy grew up, the failed marriages, those who found that wealth does not bring success in love and life. She would not talk about Lucy's childhood memories.

Lucy tells us about her childhood, impoverished in material things and in love, when she was isolated and rejected by the 'superior' children. She tells of her dysfunctional family, her escape, and her ignorance and innocence of the greater world, of her first love, her marriage, and her children.

Lucy loves easily anyone who has been kind and accepting--her Sixth grade teacher who teaches about Black Hawk, who Lucy also loves, the writing instructor at the workshop, her doctor, her neighbor Jeremy, even her distant mother. "I loved him," I loved her," she says.

Lucy is also 'ruthless,' ignoring what people think of her, living her life and doing what she needs to do. Her writing teacher advises Lucy not to protect anyone when writing. As Jeremy had told her, she had to be ruthless. This ruthlessness involves leaving her first husband, not accepting his inherited Nazi money, and alienating her beloved daughters. She knew she would never write another book if she stayed.

No one can understand another person fully, Lucy tells us. We must not judge. Even when Lucy's own mother cannot tell her daughter, "I love you," even when her father publicly humiliates her brother. We do not know what demons drive and bind people.

An author does not usually give us direct clues to the meaning of their work; it is hidden away, little things here and there which the reader puts together. Lucy's writing teacher tells her exactly what she is writing about: This is a story about love, she says, people who love imperfectly, "because we all love imperfectly."

You have only one story, Lucy had been told. And Lucy tells us about her life, how people think she came from nothing, which she knows is not true, and how she just lived her life, blindly, fighting to do what she needs to do.

"Strout animates the ordinary with an astonishing force."- The New Yorker

Other books by the author include Olivia Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which I read a number of years ago.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

My Name is Lucy Barton
Elizabeth Strout
Random House
Publication Date January 12, 2016
$26.00 hard cover
ISBN:9781400067695