Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Random House, 2008     ISBN: 9781400062089

These thirteen linked stories are set in a small Maine coastal town where everyone pretty much knows everyone else and where everyone definitely knows Olive Kittredge, school teacher, parent, wife, and grandmother, who figures into each story.

Each story, while revealing the ups and downs of the town’s inhabitants, their passions, depressions, dreams, and failures, reveals a little bit more about Olive. We ultimately come to know her as a complex person: prickly, judgmental, occasionally generous, contradictory, manipulative, loving, disappointed, frustrated, and wholly human.

The roles she plays in each story vary from irritation at the demands on her, to her need to feel integral to the ongoing life of the town. While something of a loner, she resents feeling left out, and craves knowing the sometimes cruel secrets others have to tell, and insinuates herself into situations where others might have left people to sort out their own problems.

Olive’s relationship with her son is the relationship in which she feels most powerless, and she is unable to comprehend how it came to pass that he has so little to say to her.