Yesterday I read Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout.  This is a beautifully crafted book.  Strout writes with grace, her sentences are lovely and stirring, and she has real ability to convey the physical, how we see, taste, and feel life around us. Her evocations of pain and sorrow and of joy (as fleeting as any joy is in this book, which set new speed records for its flight) are compelling, and her descriptions of the landscapes of Maine are stunning in both their originality and their accuracy.  And yet I cannot call this a great book. Strout does not trust her own writing enough to tell us a good story about a group of people; instead, she pulls tricks to try to get us to emote.  Emote we do, but the hyperbole of the characters and their situations feels like a manipulation. The overdone drama is a disservice to the truth of life that Strout is trying to present: that life is a struggle, some days more than others, but giving it up is more than most of us could bear to do.

There are moments of greatness in Olive Kitteridge when Strout turns down the volume of misery and lets the everyday events of life create intense feeling, and beauty.  We don’t need Strout’s hammer of ill-fated characters pounding away on a plot based on inexorable misery to understand life’s pains and joys, its moments of despair and of gratitude, and with Strout’s great talent, she doesn’t either.  Why so many suicides?  Why did most characters need mood altering medication (not that they got it)?  Can one small town in Maine really produce such extreme problems, extreme dysfunction, extreme misery, and insufferable retirees as well? When Strout backs away from extreme states of being, she achieves truth and beauty, as she does in the absolutely breathtaking and perfect last chapter of the book.  But when she insists on piling on misfortune and unhappiness, her words, although still beautiful, create chapters that feel false and almost bullying in their message of misery.

The truth is most of us do have problems and sorrows and issues we need to work out.  But we do not need medication (this book is a promotional piece for Prozac), we do not beat our children, and we do not contemplate running far, far away or ending it all more than a few times a year.  We understand the necessity of love and connection, either instinctively or through experience.  At times we do forget the goodness we can give and receive, especially when we suffer a loss or a setback or a rejection: we become angry, self-absorbed, resentful.  Strout’s best chapters remind us that everyone has a burden to bear and we are not alone in unhappiness. Her worst chapters pile on misery and horribleness, and leave only a few snatched moments of lightness for relief, if not for us, then for the characters.  I could take the misery if I felt Strout was offering it as a genuine story but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the characters were not real, that I was being played like a fiddle, and that a more human story, told at a lower decibel, would ultimately have moved me much more.

I am grateful that Strout made Olive a very real person, and did not resort to hyperbole with her main character.  I understood both Olive’s strengths and her weaknesses, and my dislike for her was mixed with a growing affection for her afflicted soul.  My admiration grew as Olive revealed her insights into certain aspects of life, like her ideas about how life’s little bursts and big bursts, (little thrills and big thrills) are important in propelling us through the years.  And she understands when her friend Marlene speaks of her dead husband’s “basket of trips”: she knows we all have dreams we hold out and hold onto to get us through the worst struggles of our lives, even when we know deep inside that those dreams are impossible.  Dreams can be powerful in countering reality when reality gets to be just too much to bear.

Despite Olive’s slices of wisdom and her perfect assessment of Bush, Jr. (ex-coke-addict Born-Again idiot), Olive has a deformed personality and she has no wisdom, no insight at all, when it comes to herself. Olive’s love for her son is very real and genuine, but it is a barbed smothering kind of love, as harmful as it is sincere. By the end of the novel, Olive has not changed so much as mellowed.  She will take what moments of beauty and affection, of desire and awe, that life will still give her, and she will not give up, not yet, on anything.  “Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.“  The enigma of life is that we want to hold onto it, no matter what, and the beauty of life is that by hanging on, we get so much back.