Olive Would Think This Election is Nonsense: Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

It would be so lovely to have an Olive Kitteredge in your life.

She’s the literary OG of keeping it real. Oh, I am certain there are other just-as-frank characters out there in the book universe, but Olive is as good an example today as any other. So maybe not OG. Right Now G.

Elizabeth Strout’s latest visit to Crosby, Maine, “Tell Me Everything,” features Olive along with familiar names including Lucy Barton and her ex-husband, William, and Bob and Margaret Burgess. Olive and Lucy are trading people stories and speaking in code, as Lucy struggles to sort through her feelings toward her ex, her kids and her dear friend Bob.

True to form, Olive cuts through the noise to get to the heart of the relationships Lucy verbally illustrates, and the writer she is, Lucy takes it to heart. At the same time, Bob is navigating his own mid-life crises, complete with special burdensome appearances of responsibility and grief by way of a special needs client that may be charged with matricide, a brother who has lost his wife and his own wife who may lose her flock.

If you enjoy Strout’s storytelling style, you’ll have no issues whatsoever with her latest. It’s effortless. So much so I used it as an example in a creative writing group one of my friends and I are trying to start. (Practically an Elizabeth Strout story in its own right. I am abysmal at commitment some days.) She has this ability to transport you to a side road in semi-rural Maine with just the best choice of words. What takes some writers entire pages to do, she does in a paragraph. Effective and to the point. Just like Olive.

There may be readers rooting for a different ending here — I personally thought it was spot on. Love is love is love, even if it can be heartbreaking. You just can never really know what is in someone else’s heart. But I really appreciate Olive’s.