By Michael McGirr
FICTION
Tell Me Everything
Elizabeth Strout
Bantam Press, $34.99
Fans of Elizabeth Strout, of whom I am one, will recognise all the characters in her new book, Tell Me Everything.
Little by little, over what are now nine novels, she has meticulously created the community of Crosby, a small town in Maine. There are many such tightly cast communities in literature and some of them feel like the set of a Hollywood Western, all facade and no foundation. As much as I loved Garrison Keilor, his Lake Wobegon in Minnesota could feel a bit like this, and the laughter came right on cue.
Strout’s Crosby is not the same as Schitt’s Creek or any other imaginary place where the pieces fit together conveniently. Crosby is full of sharp edges. At one level, it is rusted by grief and loss. At another, it is renewed by the way in which inhabitants invest in each other and their stories. It is a place that people take with them when they leave and take up when they return.
Tell Me Everything is structured around the cycle of seasons, a reminder that character is shaped to a considerable extent by physical environment. The geography of Maine makes its presence felt more than many places. Summer is serious and winter is humourless.
Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins in the HBO dramatisation of Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 novel, Olive Kitteridge.Credit: HBO
Olive Kitteridge is now 90 years old. I had suspected, at the end of Olive, Again, that she was dying. Re-reading that book, it seems that Strout was artfully deceiving the reader. Now Olive is at Maple Tree Apartments, as angular as ever, suffering no fools and spending her words like hard-earned cash. There is an integrity in Olive which wins the affection of readers, despite her grumpy and judgmental behaviour. She is a remorseless observer of her fellows, and, having buried two husbands, no stranger to the sour taste of loss.
Author Elizabeth Strout.Credit: Getty Images
Olive looks forward to the visits of Lucy Barton, Strout’s other recurrent protagonist, who is now a successful writer, still trying to build a life around a transactional relationship with her former husband, William. We have seen Lucy and William in all weathers, both of them coming to terms with traumatic childhoods. They spent lockdown together, isolated in their non-marriage. Lucy and Olive share stories; Olive listens like a wary editor, cross-examining the plausibility of everything Lucy shares. This is a delightful relationship: two wounded people slowly grow in trust.
Bob Burgess, another of Strout’s familiar characters, has returned to Crosby and is now married to Margaret, a Unitarian minister who is having a tough time with some of her congregation. Margaret is an admirable woman, but she doesn’t have the capacity of Lucy Barton to allow Bob to just talk. One of the threads of the story concerns Bob’s growing reliance on Lucy and slow drift away from his second marriage. Lucy and Bob discuss things like the nature of envy and whether their country is headed for civil war. “Bob felt again that just to be in the company of Lucy gave him a respite from everything.” For Margaret, conversation exists mostly to get things done. Bob’s first wife, Pam, for whom he still carries a torch, is an alcoholic.
No plot summary will do justice to Strout’s keen observation of small gestures and the way the featherweight of words can tip the scales of a life. Much of the action in this book coalesces around the story of Matthew Beach, an eccentric artist who lives on an isolated road in the back woods. He is accused of the murder of his 87-year-old mother, Gloria, whose body is located in a disused quarry about two hours away.
Bob Burgess, a lawyer, doesn’t have much enthusiasm about defending Matt. He is supposed to be slowing down, after all. But unlike his go-getter brother, Jim, Bob Burgess has a soft spot for people who carry a burden. Bob spent most of his life believing that he was to blame for the death of his father. It turns out that Jim was responsible but allowed his younger brother to carry the burden.
All these lives are a mess of unacknowledged emotion, intricately woven into a delicate tissue of truth-telling. Tell Me Everything is a great title for a book that draws its characters into an acceptance of their reality by creating structures in which they can talk about the wear and tear of life. Strout builds a unique world which is all the more relatable because of that. You can never waste time in her company.
Michael McGirr’s latest book is Ideas to Save Your Life (Text).
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