Olive is a retired school teacher. She is hard-edged and difficult. She misses things. She rubs people the wrong way. Her only adult child has made a beeline across the country to avoid her and even when his marriage fails, he refuses to return. It kills her, this lack of loyalty. Her husband, Henry, has fantasised about an affair with his pharmacy assistant, but decided against it. ‘To leave Olive was as unthinkable as sawing off his leg.’ Bob says to Jane on the night of a local performance. ‘I don’t know how he can stand her.’ Later Jane says, ‘He loves her. That’s how he can stand her.’
And it’s true. Olive has her moments. She inadvertently foils her past student’s suicide attempt. ‘At the very moment Kevin became aware of liking the sound of her voice, he felt adrenaline pour through him, the familiar awful intensity, the indefatigable system that wanted to endure.’ As far as she knows, she is just sitting in his car having a chat. But then Strout takes it further. They see a young woman he went to school with jump from a peer in the marina and Kevin is obliged to save her.
‘Even though, staring into her open eyes in the swirling salt-filled water, with sun flashing through each wave, he thought he would like this moment to be forever: the dark-haired woman on shore (Olive) calling for their safety, the girl who had once jumped rope like a queen, now holding him with the fierceness that matched the power of the ocean – oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.’
It’s great, isn’t it? It slapped me across the face. It’s a rare book which faces the problem of living, or wanting to and not wanting to all at once. Strout burrows right into the paradoxical nature of it. It’s darkly comic too. I’ve gone back and read this scene over and over. And there is Olive in the middle of it, accidentally kind and unkind and real. And you start to think it could be possible that what we intended might be nothing compared to what we have achieved unwittingly.
Elizabeth Strout’s, Olive Kitteridge, is unusually good when it comes to the character of Olive. She is utterly believable and the story itself is made better by its telling in a series of short stories. (See Tim Winton’s, The Turning for another like this) It’s a reminder of our blinding self-obsession and how rare moments of true clarity are. Life chops and changes too. It moves one way and then the other and what we feel in the morning is different by the afternoon. How difficult life is for such a black and white character as Olive. In Strout’s novel, this short story-like structure knits together many facets of a woman who is struggling to find an adequate and convincing raison d’etre and she is not the only one.
This novel is well-peopled. We see almost a whole town’s worth of hopes, dreams and disappointments, but Strout always brings us back to Olive. She has our allegiance and she must find her reason. It is Olive’s ‘to be or not to be’ soliloquy. Yes, it’s that big. What’s it all for after all? The humdrum-ness of it, day after day after day. What is it exactly that pushes us on apart from that knee-jerk need to breathe?
I wouldn’t like you to think this is a story about suicide, even though its mentioned. It’s not. It’s about life, the nature of it, its mystery, its unknowable future. Please read, Olive Kitteridge. I think you might like it:
‘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 thin 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.’