"Tell Me Everything" by Elizabeth Strout

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

"Lucy by the sea" by Elizabeth Strout

An audio book.

Bill and (first-person) Lucy were married 20 years, then divorced 20 years before the book's events. He's a scientist, she's a novelist. Bill's wife has left him, and Lucy's husband John died about a year before. Circumstances bring them together again. When Covid hits New York, Will decides they should escape to Maine. While there, Lucy hears about friends dying and her son-in-law Trey's unfaithfulness (Trey's a poet who Becka married on the bounce). Living under the same roof, old tensions reappear. The locals don't like New Yorkers.

Will meets his estranged half-sister Lois, who hated their mother. He tells Lucy (but hasn't told their daughters) that he had a prostate op because of cancer. He's unable to have sex.

She's becoming friendly with Bob. She finds the regularity of the tide comforting. "My whole childhood was a lockdown" she says.

Lucy and Bill start sleeping together again. She gives up her New York flat (it was where she and John had lived)

Bill and Bob make a writing studio for her - the first she's ever had. She writes a story using ingredients she's recently collected, about a white policeman who evades arrest. Her brother dies (found in his flat). It doesn't seem to affect her much. She makes an attempt to understand people unlike her - Trump supporters; her sister (who's become a fundamentalist christian). Will's unfaithfulness had hurt and humbled her. When her daughter Chrissie after her 3rd miscarriage thinks of having an affair, Lucy's against it. Chrissie changes her mind at the last moment. Becka, c.40, is accepted at Yale.

There are lots of little anecdotes and memories. Chapters sometimes end with foreshadowing. I'm surprised that a supposed novelist would think "the ocean seemed a blue colour" (rather than "the ocean seemed blue") or "and I would think to myself 'I am happy'", or "her eyes looked smaller in her face" - I just wouldn't say those phrases. And the insights/events seem unexceptional to me. I'm not tempted to read any more of her books.

Other reviews

• Alexandra Harris
• Julie Myerson (her most nuanced – and intensely moving – Lucy Barton novel yet. Indeed it’s a truly monumental piece of work)
• Bailey Sincox (Like the works of Alice Munro, Strout’s novels are portraits of unremarkable, profoundly human lives. Her interest is in the local and the particular)

"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.)