An audio book, set in Crosby, Maine. Post-covid.
It's a mesh of stories by old people with previous spouses and old friends (the characters and setting are used in other books by the author). They're still learning from past experiences. They share their fears, Couples still argue and make up.
Bob Burgess is 65, a retired lawyer. He's been married to Marge, a church minister, for 15 years. His father died when his brother Jim, a boy then, was playing with the car in the drive and it ran their father over. Bob took the blame.
Olive has 4 grandchildren. Her best friend was Isobel, who had to move to the other side of town.
Lucy, 66, has moved from New York with her ex-husband William (who had affairs). She's a writer, a friend of Bob. William is a parasitologist
Olive invites Lucy over to tell her stories - Olive's mother carried in her handbag a press cutting about the boy she wanted to marry; a woman whose husband was a closet gay took in her husband's young lover when her husband died, and left the house to him in her will. Lucy's interested in who knew what and how. She tells Olive that she sometimes feels she has a connection with someone she encounters at random, younger men mostly. Lucy wonders whether these unrecorded lives have meaning.
Pam visits Bob, her ex-husband. They've not been in contact for years. They talk for 4 hours. She says that she hates her life and friends, and was (is?) a secret alcoholic. One of her sons is a transvestite. She saw her husband having sex with a friend and didn't feel hurt.
Jim's wife has a month to live. Jim doesn't want people to know. Susan has told Pam who told Bob. Jim's wife dies. Jim apologises to son Larry for being a lousy father.
An old woman disappears. She'd been living with her unmarried son Matthew Beake. Bob offers to defend Beake, who stands to gain from his mother's death. He's a good amateur artist. One of his models was a pregnant woman whose credit card was stolen to hire a car that might have been involved with the disappearance.
Olive's upset because Isobel is moving away. She wonders about killing herself. Bob asks Matthew if he's thinking of killing himself - he keeps a gun in the house.
Pam, having gone to AA, falls off the wagon. Marge is worried about losing her job. Bob sees Matt Beake's sister at the airport and phones Matt, telling him to stay out of his house. His sister kills herself in the house. She was about to be arrested for the murder of her mother. Jim and Bob agrees that their memory of events around their father's death is unreliable.
As Lucy and Bob's friendship deepens, Marge and Bob become more distant. Bob feels guilty that he's falling in love. Lucy describes Bob as a "sin-eater" - someone who is drawn to people who have done wrong. After they have a little disagreement he hears from William has she's finally agreed to remarry him. Marge doesn't lose her job. Bob treats Matt a bit like a son.
The text reminds readers that there's a narrator - "Here is what happened -"; "As we have just mentioned", etc.
When I read her Olive again book, marketed as short stories, I didn't think much of it. I like this book more - perhaps because I'm older now and can empathize more with the (almost exclusively old) characters, or perhaps because I should have read her interconnected stories more as a novel.
Other reviews
- Mattis Gravingen (All of them feel lonely. But why? The novel seems to answer that their loneliness is interlinked with a withering United States that makes people struggle to connect. The characters feel a “terror”, not just about their decay as they grow older and more lonely, but also because their country is falling apart. ... But perhaps a better answer to why the characters are lonely is that none of them listen to others.)
- Elizabeth Lowry
- Judith McKinnon
