Running into 2025 with reading books recommended by people whose taste I really trust (hi, Julia!) but I’ve been putting off for whatever reason. In this case, it’s because I had this vague sense that the book was the anti-A Man Called Ove/Iona Iverson, e.g., what if you’ve got an elderly lead character and she’s not going to have a late-in-life fuzzy-feeling reconnection with the world plot that weaves together her neighbors? And that’s just…not really my vibe, normally speaking.
Honestly? It’s not…not that, and it did take me some time to get “into” this book–I started it on my flight back home, wasn’t able to concentrate enough to get into it, tried bits and pieces on the train etc, but only really snapped into the mood yesterday and then basically zipped through the entire thing (as a matter of fact, I even chose to take the bus all the way home from my friend’s place–even though it added a solid 15-20 minutes to the commute–so that I could read without having to switch trains or stand in a crowded tube etc).
The entire book takes place more or less in Crosby, Maine, where Olive Kitteridge has spent essentially her entire life with her husband Henry and, for a time, her son Christopher. She is a large woman, a fact that bears repeating because it seems to color a lot of how she goes through the world. Chomsky writ flesh, one could say, that her brash and unsubtle mannerisms flow from her large and unsubtle presence in the actual world. She doesn’t seem to have many friends, aside from her husband, and her relationship with her son seems tenuous at best. But it’s also very evident that she’s not reacting to an entirely external set of circumstances–Olive is also a profoundly negative person, with unresolved issues (neuroticism, for sure) which impede her ability to connect with others.
But we’re not entirely focused on her, at least not at first–the book is told via series of vignettes on the lives of those in the neighborhood, all of which at some point or another intersect with Olive. Maybe it’s a former student of hers with marital issues who nonetheless sniffs at her, or the couple who sit across from them at church, but you get these little tidbits that you grab at like the gossipy townsfolk whom you’re following. Olive said what? I agree, what does Henry see in her?
When the book does shift into a mostly-Olive POV, we’re just enough on her side that the subsequent realisations (her DIL might be high handed and Christopher might be standoffish and they might have built them a beautiful house in town…but she’s hardly mother of the year, and living in the same small town you grew up in can be a lot…) that perhaps she is the reason for her own misery are just that much harder to swallow. I think we’re not often asked as readers to ‘blame’ the main characters for their failings, especially in a culture that valorizes the triple shift of being a working mother-slash-wife, which makes it all the more subversive when, say, Olive admits that she didn’t just spank Christopher but at times hit him, full stop. It’s a throwaway line, really, that comes out while she’s trying to think through/justify/defend herself against Christopher’s recollections of his childhood, but it shows us that we can’t just be Team Olive and take the easy way out of this story.
I knew while reading this that there is a sequel, which means it doesn’t end,as some others in the genre do, with Olive passing away. Or at least that’s my assumption! I’m curious to read the next and see where she goes…but I might be a bit disappointed (?!?) if she does soften up.