"Olive Kitteridge"

You know how it goes, we've all been there. The lights dim, the previews play, you have your popcorn with junior mints and rice crackers thrown in, and you munch away, waiting for the main attraction. You wait and munch, wait and munch, the anticipation heavy, as this show has been deemed the movie of the year, “two thumbs way up,” life-changing, even.

The lights dim, the movie begins, and you munch your way through half of it, but as you munch you start thinking: “Is this it? Am I missing something?” After all the anticipation, the trouble you went through to find a babysitter, the weeks of “you've got to see it” recommendations, you are, well. . . disappointed.

“Olive Kitteridge” was the novel equivalent of that movie to me. The Pulitzer Prize winner for 2009, the reviewers raved, friends ranted, and I got excited to read a book that I knew I would adore. After weeks of reading only non-fiction, the thought of delving in and losing myself amidst the page turning antics of Olive, a pleasantly plump, retired school teacher living in a small town in Maine sounded like just the mid-Winter respite I needed.

USA Today called this book “glorious,” and author Elizabeth Strout has carefully crafted a very thorough character study. We come to know Olive through her involvement in thirteen narratives which revolve around members of the small, changing community of Crosby, Maine. Innovative though it may be, as full of a character as Olive is, I just wasn't drawn in.

But I must admit, I really, really liked Olive. She is a central figure in several of the stories, and through her actions, her pithy observations, and her responses to other characters and the situations in which they find themselves, we find Olive to be a no-nonsense, take-me-or-leave-me kind of woman. At times she comes across as cold and unknowable, particularly in her interactions with her husband and her son, yet every time I formed a judgment, Olive surprised me.

For example, in the story “Starving,” Olive stumbles upon Nina, a dying anorexic teenager, and immediately bursts into tears.

“You're starving.” The girl didn't move, only said “uh-duh.”

“I'm starving, too,” Olive said. “Why do you think I eat every donut in sight?”

“You're not starving,” Nina said with disgust.

“Sure I am. We all are” (96).

This glimpse of compassion, even some semblance of empathy in Olive is surprising and disarming, and it was through small admissions like this that Olive became very authentic and unique.

In some ways I found myself pitying Olive. At her son's wedding, Olive takes note that most of the crowd is made up of the bride's friends and family. But "Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her that way, can't stand the blah, blah, blah. And they'd just as soon blah-blah-blah about you when your back is turned" (68).

At one point well into the novel, she begins to deal with living alone after a stroke puts her husband into a near vegetative state, and he is moved to a nursing home. Olive is not handling this solitary life well, yet she has never had any real friends and doesn't wish to make any this late in the game. The narrator explains “She didn't like to be alone. Even more, she didn't like being with people” (148).

In spite of her seeming lack of desire to connect with others, in her old age Olive reminisces about life with her husband, and sends out a clarion call to the reader.

There were days—she could remember this—when Henry would hold her hand as they walked home, middle-aged people, in their prime. Had they known at these moments to be quietly joyful? Most likely not. People mostly did not know enough when they were living life that they were living it. But she had that memory now, of something healthy and pure (162).

Pay attention, she says, enjoy the humdrum, the quiet moments of tenderness, the comfort of the known. This is life! This is grace! Notice it, observe it, be grateful for it!

During the last few days, this book, these characters, this small town in Maine has drawn my thoughts to it over and over again. Several of the stories were deeply moving, raw and perfectly relayed--simple yet lyrical. At times while reading the book my heart literally ached for the characters, as they accepted, with an air of quiet resignation, what their lives would be about.

And in the end, this may be why “Olive Kitteridge” won the Pulitzer Prize. Elizabeth Stout's ability to create characters who stick with you, characters who infuriate you or whom you pity or with whom you'd like to sit down for a cup of coffee, this is the strength of the novel.

Yet as much as I adored the characters, I just did not “feel” the book as a whole. Who can explain why certain books impress themselves upon you, why sometimes a novel is literally an escape or a deep well of comfort, while others—even those which have been highly touted by friends and critics alike—are beautifully-written drudgery?

It is then that I am reminded of what the reader brings to the book, and that literary preferences are, in the end, subjective.

Last week as I was reading this book, my mind was inundated with the news of Haiti's devastation, and as I was reading I found my mind wandering, thinking of people buried under the rubble of their homes, of babies without mothers, of mothers who lost their babies. I considered adopting one of those babies. I wondered what my husband would think of adding a Haitian child to our family. I thought of the rainbow of cream and tan and brown and black that would make up our family, and how adopting a Haitian child just made sense.

And then I'd think of how difficult it would be to adopt from Haiti, how tangled and messy it could get, how unrealistic it might be for our family, and my mind turned again to the despair of hundreds of thousands of people as I sat in my warm home, on my comfortable chair, my stomach full, a hot cup of coffee in my hands and a novel before me.

And I found myself irritated at the frivolous, self-absorbed characters in "Olive Kitteridge," and even more irritated with my own frivolity and self-absorption.

In the end, my disappointment with "Olive Kitteridge," was tinged with possibility. Six months or a year down the road, if I read the book again, I may love it, I may declare to my friends that they just have to read it. I may even call it "life-changing." But this week, reading it seemed a frivolous waste of time.