How do you see people? How do you understand their character? Do you even understand their character? What if your understanding of someone’s personality is shallow, one-sided, or, worse, totally wrong? Reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout feels painfully like being reminded that we can never ever fully understand somebody, that we will always be mistaken. Skilfully, brilliantly crafted as a series of short interlinking stories, it provides the reader various perspectives on our titular character which may or may not be right.
As a whole, Olive Kitteridge tells stories of people of Crosby, a fictional little sea-side town where our main protagonist lives for almost her entire life. Some of them are about her ex-students, some about her neighbors, some about her and her family. These stories are usually composed of pieces of memories or broken fragments of (unreliably narrated) incidents.
Pharmacy is the story where we can see Olive Kitteridge for the first time, and merely in a glimpse―through her husband’s eyes, and what the narrative sees might be her reaction in a certain situation. Henry Kitteridge is a pharmacist and usually has an assistant, but his old assistant passed away so now he has a new one, a young woman named Denise Thibodeau. Olive doesn’t like her, of course, as she never likes most of the people in town; but Henry likes her, has sympathy for her. And it is all the more so when Denise’s husband died after his friend misfired his gun and shot him on a hunting spree. Denise’s world turns upside down and Henry is so ready to help her get back on her feet. Olive can see through that, as she can see through almost anything, and shows her cynical attitude by calling her “your girlfriend.” When it comes to Olive, however, cynicism is rarely in the wrong place.
But Olive and Henry never do have a harmonious husband-and-wife relationship, as hinted throughout the book, and clearly described in A Different Road, told from Olive’s own point of view. Their relationship has very much deteriorated, especially over the past year, that their neighbors all agree: they have changed. A neighbor’s daughter is even so bold as to make a suggestion for them to go to a crisis counseling. What the people of Crosby don’t really know, though, is that Olive and Henry haven’t changed after their only son, Christopher, moved out to California with his wife, but, rather, after the horrible night in a hospital where they are held hostage by two young boys looking for drugs. All of the anger, disappointment, accusations, distaste come pouring out their frightened mouths under the guns. In only one incident, we can see both Henry and Olive have totally different views on one same thing. And just because it is told from Olive’s side doesn’t necessarily make her argument and “facts” valid.
Olive’s view has also seemed to be proven wrong in A Little Burst. When her son Christopher is finally married at the age of 38, Olive can’t help but feel the intense anxiety, worry, shock and fear of a mother who thinks their children will never leave their side. She wants to feel happy, but the fact that Christopher only dated Suzanne for six weeks before deciding to marry her, to Olive, feels too much of a sudden. To make things worse, on the wedding day, she unintentionally eavesdrops Suzanne’s conversation with her friend in which she says, “Christopher’s had a hard time,” and Olive seethes with rage―thinking that Suzanne does not know anything about her son yet acts like she does. Olive’s wrong view here might seem only to be validated by an unreliable character in an unreliable conversation, but it can be definitely confirmed in Security where Christopher himself expresses all of his bottled up feelings―mostly anger and disappointment, just like what Olive has toward her husband.
How Henry and Christopher see Olive, as a wife and a mother, seems so distant and thus hard to believe (and wrong, according to Olive herself); but this is in line with how she is described in her neighbors’ stories. She seems to be that unfriendly, cynical, grumpy old lady. She is a good person, but not one anybody can easily make friends with. While in The Piano Player she, and Henry, only appear in a flash and are not much told of; in Winter Concert people are whispering about them, and mostly in an unkind tone.
One particular story, though, entitled Tulips, shows a quite disturbing “revelation.” Told from Olive’s point of view, it initially tells about a son of her neighbors who murdered a woman by stabbing her with a knife 29 times. The Larkins then inevitably become the talk of the town and are shunned―no one talks to them, no one visits their house. But Olive, out of gratitude, visits Louise Larkin after she sent a message to deliver her sympathy knowing Henry has a stroke. Olive means well, and though Louise doesn’t seem mentally stable they have a nice chat―until she strikes Olive with a punch. In a mocking tone, she says she’s sorry for Olive because Christopher is not by her side when Henry is seriously ill and only came once. What hurts Olive is not Louise’s unpleasant remark, but the truth it implies: that even when Christopher is divorced from Suzanne, he stays in California and doesn’t come back home.
The way Olive’s ex-students remember her in the past is generally much better. She had always been their strict yet compassionate math teacher at high school. This impression is somehow proven right in Starving, in which we can see her put her heart and soul to persuading a student to eat and encouraging her to be cured of her anorexia. But not everybody she taught has the same impression, or so it seems, especially in Incoming Tide. Kevin Coulson comes back to his hometown, brooding over his totally miserable life while watching his sort of childhood friend working in a café near the bay. His father died of cancer, his brother is a drug addict, his mother suffered from depression and committed suicide with a pistol, and, to make it even worse, his girlfriend suffers from the same illness. When Olive suddenly appears by his car and gets into it without his permission, somewhat comforting him by telling him that her own father also died of suicide, Kevin feels far from being comforted and secretly wants her to just leave him alone.
Olive Kitteridge is a prism of her character, where different people occupying different stories make up different shades of her personality. Nothing can be claimed as the truth, even when Olive tells something from her own perspective other people (or, perhaps, the reader) will not 100% believe it. And even if they do, their bias will not allow them to entirely understand her. The way Strout writes, and structures, each narrative of the stories here makes Olive’s character uncertain, indefinite, and her person―with all her thoughts and sayings―untrustworthy. But this what makes the core strength of the whole book. Strout doesn’t write about a heroine, a “reliable” narrator, a person with goodness and kindness and no flaw whatsoever. She writes about your neighbor next door, literally. An ordinary old lady who is unfriendly to almost everybody, despises her husband, but loves children and, especially, her child.
The pain of reading this book does not come, most of the time, from the fact that the protagonist is horrendously flawed, but that the protagonist reflects everyone of us; and that the ironic remarks she makes are almost always right. Many writers are able to write real life into their fiction, but not many as painfully accurate as Strout is able.
“Bad things happen,” she wanted to say. “Where have you been?”
Rating: 4.5/5
The Bookly Purple 