Olive Kitteridge

What a perfect book with which to start this endeavor. A small collection of short stories (although I would be willing to write a lengthy paper defending it as a novel) about a small town, small lives, and one large woman. Olive Kitteridge not only followed the lives of the people in this town, but it used their lives to tell the story of aging, of change, and of how these themes influence marriage, love, and parenting.

Let’s just get this out there: the last two paragraphs of this book are words that will stick with me forever. Let’s work under the assumption that all of these book reviews will contain spoilers, there is no way around it. I’ll do my best to not reveal any huge moments that might ruin the book for others, but passages must be used. A discussion of a book isn’t anything without citations, after all.

“What young people didn’t know, she thought, lying down beside this man, his hand on her shoulder, her arm; oh, what young people did not know. They did not know that lumpy, aged, and wrinkled bodies were as needy as their own young, firm ones, that love was not to be tossed away carelessly, as if it were a tart on a platter with others that got passed around again. No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry [her husband] and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.

And so, if this man [not her husband] next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union—what pieces life took out of you.”

You see? Could I have chosen a better book with which to start? What a message in these last words, but also throughout the book. The theme of aging is constantly present as we watch Olive, her husband, and her son age through the points of view of other townspeople. It is in “A Little Burst” that we first see Olive’s aging physically. At her son’s wedding she finds herself in a spare bedroom noticing how her body has changed, how clothes no longer flatter her, and how a few spare hairs are sprouting from her chin.

There is mention of “another heart attack,” which of course suggests that she has already had a heart attack, but there isn’t any other mention of it in the book, an example of how Strout understates some of the more traumatic details of the characters’ lives. Another example of this is when she startlingly describes Kevin’s mother suicide: “Kevin could not abide the thought of any child discovering what he had discovered; that his mother’s need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards” (33). Strout skillfully takes the startling image of brains being blown across a kitchen and finds lyricism in it.

There is a wisdom that comes with aging as the stories progress and we see different examples of how characters experience it. Even though Janie in “Winter Concert” admits to being scared of the “day [she is] going to die” (138), she goes on, just a few paragraphs later, to admit that she does “not envy those young girls in the ice cream shop. Behind the bored eyes of the waitresses handing out sundaes there loomed, she knew, great earnestness, great desires, and great disappointments; such confusion lay ahead for them, and (more wearisome) anger; oh, before they were through, they would blame and blame and blame, then get tired, too” (139). What I adored in Strout’s depiction of growing old was how she took the time to confront the fears of aging while also showing, through the behavior of younger, more vapid characters, how stabilizing the process is.

Of course the horror of aging is not overlooked, in fact is confronted magnificently, and the culmination comes when Olive goes to visit her son and his new wife in New York City, well into the last stages of her life: “Stepping into the little closet of a bathroom, she flicked on the light, and saw in the mirror that across her blue cotton blouse was a long and prominent strip of sticky dark butterscotch sauce. A small feeling of distress took hold. They had seen this and not told her. She had become the old lady her Aunt Ora had been, when years ago she and Henry would take the old lady out for a drive, stopping some nights to get an ice cream, and Olive had watched as Aunt Ora had spilled melted ice cream down her front; she had felt repulsion at the sight of it. In fact, she was glad when Ora died, and Olive didn’t have to continue to witness the pathetic sight” (226).

Strout sheds light on the vibrancy and frustrations of older adults, and I consider myself lucky to have read this book at my age. It is so easy, as Olive’s own son does, to imagine older people in our lives as incompetent annoyances, but Strout wonderfully defends the aged characters. This book serves as a battle call from the top of the octogenarian mountain. It screams, “We are still alive, we are still thinking, we are still feeling!” What perceptive empathy Strout has as a writer for her characters.

In this same vein, the theme of change is shown through the progression of time in the characters lives. There are endless examples, mainly from Olive’s often cynical point of view, of older adults looking at the younger generation in confusion and bewilderment: “Amazing how nasty kids are these days” (65), she observes. Or when she struggles to find the name for ADHD: “One of them is hyperactive, can’t concentrate, whatever it is these days when a kid can’t sit still” (128). For most of the characters there is an extreme disconnect between the younger characters (their children, nephews, employees) and themselves. They struggle with it as their children grow into adults with their own troubled marriages, stubborn children, and emotional distress.

Strout also cleverly extends the theme of change by having the stories progress through the changing seasons: from spring, to summer, to fall, to winter, to spring again in the end as Olive is reborn into her life as a widow. “The tulips died, the tress turned red, the leaves fell off, the trees were bare, snow came. All these changes she watched from the bump-out room, where she lay on her side, clutching her transistor radio, her knees tucked to her chest” (148). As Olive and the other characters age, the seasons in which the stories take place progress from the buds of spring to the dead of winter. The seasons also, predictably, become a metaphor for aging: “She would have to decide soon whether or not to plant the tulips, before the ground was frozen” (162), surely a metaphor for death and one last one hurrah at living after the death of her husband.

Perhaps the only older character who appreciates youth outwardly and sees in them something more than wasted days and energy is Harmon, who admits, “God, I love young people… They get griped about enough. People like to think the younger generation’s job is to steer the world to hell. But it’s never true, is it? They’re hopeful and good—and that’s how it should be” (80). He also is the one character who resists being left behind by in his old age. When he hears of the term “fuck buddy,” he actively engages his son in a conversation to get at the root of the term. What was so compelling about Harmon’s story, “Starving,” and his conversation with his son is that he is asking his son to describe a new, youthful term, but the term describes something that is timeless. We find out that Harmon himself has a “fuck buddy,” though he would be remiss to ever call it that. What was so fantastic about “Starving” was how it bridged this generational gap and showed how, even if the names for relationships and emotions change, they are still universally experienced and complicated, no matter one’s age.

Tied tightly with the theme of change is the complication of marriage and love over time. When Olive’s son marries, she is skeptical of the validity of their vows after they had only known each other a short time: “Of course, right now their sex life is probably very exciting, and they undoubtedly think that will last, the way new couples do. They think they’re finished with loneliness, too” (68). With each mention of matrimony and fidelity, Strout makes a point of showing that marriage is still a lonely state. I can’t find the passage now, but Olive states in the last story that we are all alone: we are born alone and we die alone. She expresses this at other times in the book, drawing on instances in her marriage when she still felt entirely alone: “And yet, standing behind her son, waiting for the traffic light to change, she remembered how in the midst of it all there had been times when she’d felt a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist’s gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth, and she had swallowed with a groan of longing, tears springing to her eyes. (‘Are you all right, Mrs. Kitteridge?’ the dentist had said.)” (224). Still, marriage serves as the “central heating of [the characters’ lives]” (83): “’I’m right here,’ she said, putting her palm to the side of his face. Because what did they have now, except for each other, and what could you do if it was not even quite that?” (139). It’s a sobering view of marriage, one that is realistic and without the trappings of typical glamorization, where spouses forget each other’s favorite songs, or so much time has passed without discussion of it that the song from two decades ago no longer applies.

The significance of parenthood becomes a unsettling topic in the book. There seems to be a similar trait for all of the characters: their parents suffered emotional and mental breakdowns, oftentimes resulting in suicide. In fact, I can’t think of one character whose parents were not stifled in their nurturing by some sort of emotional flaw. Olive’s mother committed suicide; I think her father did, too. Kevin’s mother definitely did, Henry’s mother suffered at least two known emotional breakdowns, and Julie and Winnie’s mother seems certifiably unstable.

Olive struggles with her own maternal instinct, or lack thereof. She never quite feels comfortable around children. She watches Suzanne, her son’s wife, cup the head of a child naturally, and her reverence for the moment suggests a stab of envy: “But the gesture, the smooth cupping of the little girl’s head, the way Suzanne’s hand in one quick motion caressed the fine hair and the neck, has stayed with Olive. It was like watching some woman dive from a boat and swim easily up to the dock. A reminder how some people could do things others could not” (64). Her love for her son, Christopher, is expressed haltingly and strangely and, unfortunately for him, mostly in her head. It comes out in angry bursts of jealousy and hurt when it is questioned or challenged: “But she loved him! She would like to say this to Suzanne. She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven’t wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son” (71). One can excuse and understand her remove from maternal emotions and her inability to express them in a productive way, considering her own unstable childhood.

Still, she is an empathetic woman, using her position as a high school math teacher to encourage and support her students even from her removed emotional platform. She is, after all, the one who saves Kevin from suicide and the one who encouraged Rebecca to talk to her any time she needed to, sensing her distress as a child.

To wrap things up, as I edge quickly past the two thousand-word mark (yikes!), I find myself contemplating the believability of Olive as a character. She is sometimes so harsh, so moody, such an extreme version of herself that it seems hard to reconcile with her softer moments, how she changes the lives of her students, and how tenderly she cares for Henry. Perhaps this is a result of her childhood and a resulting emotional remove that I cannot understand thoroughly from a psychological standpoint. But she is a strong character, as a person and as a central point of the novel. I find myself remembering the moments in which she starred the most vividly, the others taking on a quieter place among the pages.

I give it four out of five stars.