At last month's Antioch Writers' Workshop, Strout's name hung in the air; she'd been one of the guests in attendance two years ago -- the same year she published Olive Kitteridge -- and people seemed to speak her name in rather reverent, hushed tones. People say my name loudly and often as the butt of a joke, so I was intrigued.
Olive is a quiet book, centering around -- wait for it -- an aging small town retired teacher named Olive Kitteridge. Some of the stories are about Olive and her family -- her kind husband and her troubled only child son -- and in others, she's merely a background player for the folks who come and go in and out of her little world.
I have a tremendous respect for the art of the short story; it's a deceptively difficult thing to create an entire, complex story in a limited number of pages. Strout handles it beautifully, weaving together a really lovely tale from a lot of different lives and stories. I just love Strout's approach to voice and language -- it's something I've been concentrating on a lot lately ... since all my characters sound suspiciously just like me.
Perhaps the only negative I might assign to Strout's book is, well, just that -- it's a little negative, for a complete lack of a more interesting or inspired word. I feel a little about Olive the way I would about Angela Lansbury -- my mom used to watch Murder She Wrote and, without fail, would comment that if she ever saw that woman ambling into town, she'd hightail it out -- you can be pretty certain that once she shows up, something bad is going to happen. Within the hour. I just wish Ms. Strout had given us a little more of the positive side of the Kitteridges and their neighbors -- I don't think the nostalgic, almost melancholy tone would have been lost.
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