Olive, again by Elizabeth Strout
The evening standard 17 october 2019
Contemporary fiction’s favourite battle-axe, Olive Kitteridge, is back. Olive’s first outing as the titular anti-heroine in Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 novel won the author the Pulitzer Prize. She was also played by Frances McDormand in a HBO mini-series of the same name.
Strout has said she never expected to write about Olive Kitteridge again but “she honestly just showed up. I could see her in her car, nosing it into the marina […] I just saw her so clearly that I thought, ‘OK, I guess I will have to write this down.’” In Olive, Again, Kitteridge is now in her early 80s but she is the same woman who, in the earlier novel, said to her only son of his new wife, “She’s so nice, Christopher, it makes me puke.”
The structure of Olive, Again is the same as Olive Kitteridge — 13 interlinked stories set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine. Some of the stories barely contain Olive at all — such as the haunting Helped, in which a woman finds platonic solace through talking to her father’s lawyer after her father is killed in a house fire. She says to him, of human existence: “I think our job — maybe even our duty — is to — […] To bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”
Strout’s enormous strength is to reveal how these odd and surprising connections can spring up: Olive falls passionately for a doctor attending her and considers “the way people can love those they barely know, and how abiding that love can be, and also how deep that love can be, even when— as in her own case— it was temporary.”
An adolescent girl cleans the house of her schoolteacher and is oppressed by its dismalness until, one day, “a strong, sensual impulse suddenly went through her, as though the chasteness of the house was screaming for her. She sat there as the feeling grew, and after a moment she slowly undid the first button on her blouse and put her hand down under her bra and felt her breast and a glow went through her.” How strange and disconcerting this is, and it becomes no less so when the schoolteacher’s elderly husband walks in on her. It would ruin the considerable pleasure of this plot twist to reveal what happens next.
Strout is an uncomfortable writer and Olive Kitteridge is the ultimate unlikeable heroine. She tells a woman visiting a fellow resident at the nursing home she comes to live in, “Your mother called me a cunt” but is good enough to admit “Oh, I deserved it”, which is perhaps fortunate, given that it transpires the cursing woman had died that week.
Death stalks these pages and while Strout’s unsettling prose won’t be for everyone, she reveals how odd our own mortality is to each of us as Olive reflects, “She was going to die. It seemed extraordinary to her, amazing. She had never really believed it before.”
This review first appeared in the Evening Standard