"Olive, Again" by Elizabeth Strout (Viking, 2019)

• Arrested - Jack, a widower with 2 Ph.Ds and a gay daughter, is caught for speeding. His cheekiness to the cops nearly gets him into bigger trouble. He phones his daughter to say he's not a nice person.
• Labor - Olive, a widow for two years, delivers a baby in her car after attending a baby shower. Her son is "a great disappointment to her". He had a still-born. Two days later, bored, she phones Jack, who she's not talked to for months. She spends the night in his house.
• Cleaning - Kayley's father died not long ago. She hasn't played the piano since. She's in the eighth grade and cleans houses in her spare time. The Ringroses are a strange religious couple. Mrs Ringrose is Kayley's teacher. She asks Kayley to wear her old wedding dress. Mr Ringrose sees Kayley exposing her breasts. He leaves her extra money. It happens again. She starts playing the piano. When she stops cleaning for the Ringroses, she's sad and stops playing the piano. Her mother finds Kayley's stored money and asks where it all came from. Kayley hides it in the piano. Her mother unwittingly sells the piano.
• Motherless Child - Olive invites her son Chris (who she's not seen for 3 years) and family for a 3 day stay. She likes her grandchildren, hates the older childen and doesn't think much of Chris's wife Ann. The childen don't talk to her. They she discovers that Ann's mother has recently died. She tells Chris that she's getting re-married. He's angry. Ann tells him to grow up. Jack pops in just before Chris and family leave. Olive sees something of herself in Ann
• Helped - 83 year-old ex banker Roger Larkin dies when his house burns down. Drug addicts started the fire by accident. His daughter Suzanne (a lawyer) visits the old family lawyer Bernie the next day. His parents died in a concentration camp. She has 2 college-aged sons and plans to confess an affair with her old therapist to her husband which will lead to divorce. Bernie says she doesn't need to tell me. She receives lots of money in the will from old South African investments. On the way home she visits her gaga mother. Her brother has a life sentence for murder. Her mother may have played with his private parts. The PoV switches to Bernie. He had helped Roger with them, had helped cover up affairs, and covered up wife-battering. Suzanne phones him, telling about her assault/affair suspicions. He says nothing. He asks whether he still has a faith. She says her therapist told her "Don't be ridiculous, Suzanne. You were a child mystified by life, and you now think it was God you felt. You were just mystified by life".
  A story with a high death/sin count and low pay-off
• Light - Cindy Coombs (her PoV) meets her ex-teacher Olive in a supermarket. Cindy has a husband Tom and 2 sons at college. She's bald - she has cancer. When a girl she wanted to be a poet. Olive visits her next day. Her only other regular visitors are a nurse and her sister-in-law - others are scared to visit. She confides in Olive about her fears. She regrets crying on Xmas day amongst her family. Olive confides too. She's been married 2 years and still thinks a lot about her first husband who she didn't treat well in his final days. She thinks she's a slightly better person now. She points out to Cindy that it isn't easy for Tom either.
• The Walk - Denny, 76, can't sleep so he goes on a walk, wondering about his 3 married kids. He sees an overdosed man and saves his life.
• Pedicure - Jack (79) and Olive (78) have been married for 5 years. As a treat, Jack has introduced Olive to pedicures. Bored by holidays in Florida they go for a drive, Olive narrativing gossip for him. When they pass her childhood haunts she tells him about an uncle who hanged himself. At a restaurant Elaine appears. She's a younger ex-colleague/misstress who in effect got him sacked. He'd been especially excited by her feet. After, Olive and Jack compare the people they (nearly) had affairs with, and those their late spouses had affairs with. At times they both greatly miss their late spouses
• Exiles - Jim and Helen (grandparents) are visiting Bob and his 2nd wife Margaret (a religious minister). Bob had grown up thinking it was he who, at 4, had caused his father's death, but in his 50s Bob admitted that the accident was his fault. Bob's infertile, which was why his 1st wife Pam left him. Pam was popular with the rest of the family, and Bob still gets on well with her. Helen gets drunk having to stay with boring Margaret and falls down the stairs. Bob thinks that "Jim would live the rest of his life as an exile, in New York City. And Bob would live the rest of his life as an exile in Maine. He would always miss Pam, he would always New York". At the end he tells the wakening Helen "I'm right here ... Not going anywhere"
• The Poet - Olive, 82, widowed again, meets a local poet Andrea (ex US poet laureate) who was never expected to be much of a success by her teachers, Olive amongst them. She tells her friends who she met. When later Olive hears she was injured by a bus, Olive thinks it was a botched suicide attempt. A few months later Olive reads that the bus driver was drunk. Later, an issue of "American Poetry Review" is delivered by hand. In it is a poem by Andrea - a nearly verbatim copy of Olive's words - Olive had told her that "You can put that in a poem. All yours"
• The End of the Civil War Days - The MacPherson's have been married for 42 years, mostly unhappily. Now the rooms are divided by tape into 2 halves - his and hers. He's into Historical Recreations, and the local annual one is happening. Daughter Lisa, 40, visits from NYC with a DVD, She tells them she's starred in a documentary - as a dominatrix. Younger daughter Laura arrives and is furious. The father, seeing the DVD, collapses and is rushed to hospital. He's ok. At his bedside his wife is friendlier to him than she's been for years.
• Heart - Olive wakes in hospital. She's been dead - heart attack. She's confused. She recovers and nurses visit - a Somali who she likes, and an ex-pupil she less keen on. She realises love can be secret and long-lasting, and you can loving someone without liking them.
• Friend - Olive moves into sheltered care and meets residents/visitors she knows or has taught. She makes a new friend.

I wasn't impressed either by the individual stories or the novel. There are many ex-partners, deaths, etc that raise the emotional stakes, but there's little return. The title is returned to at the story's end.

Other reviews

• Hannah Beckerman (Olive, Again is made up of interconnected stories all set in a small town in Maine. It is two years since Olive’s husband, Henry, died, and grief has not mellowed her: she is still brusque, unforgiving, formidable. But beneath the hard carapace – and this is where part of Strout’s genius lies – is compassion, empathy and vulnerability, as Olive starts to feel aware of her own mortality. ... The 13 tales, told from a range of perspectives, explore Strout’s preoccupations with grief, loneliness and familial torments ... Throughout the book, disparate, disconnected people share transformative moments.)
• Lucy Hughes-Hallett (These books are structured as collections of linked stories, but Strout’s publisher calls them novels. It might be more accurate to say they are the prose-narrative equivalent of a long-running TV drama series.)
• John Phipps (Of the thirteen stories here, Olive features prominently in half. The others focus on a broad cast of unconnected characters, with a glancing appearance or cameo from Olive keeping them just threaded to the rest of the book. ... 'The End of the Civil War Days’ is Strout’s funniest story to date. Olive, Again also contains her first to ever fall flat. ‘Heart’ starts out with Olive waking up from a heart attack. The passages set in hospital are amongst the best in the book. But the story tails off into a too-obvious plea for compassion across political boundaries, making loud clunking sounds as it goes.)
• Jonathan Vatner (as usual in Strout’s stories, the craft is virtuosic and often risky. A seed planted in the first few pages — often a bit of gossip or a retrospective observation — bears fruit in the final turn. The point of view shifts unexpectedly or jumps forward or backward in time. Surprises wing in but always make a crazy kind of sense.)