Dear All Souls Book Group,

Enclosed are a few questions and proposals about Elizabeth Strout’s novel-in-stories, Olive Kitteridge, which we will be discussing this coming Monday night, May 10th, in the first floor conference room of the Warner Building, at 7 p.m. Our second meeting about Olive Kitteridge will take place Monday, May 17th, at 7 p.m., in the Parish Hall.

Copies of Olive Kitteridge are available at Accent on Books, on Merrimon Avenue, at reduced cost, thanks to parishioner, Lewis Sorrells.

Questions and Proposals about Olive Kitteridge, including a game-plan for how to discuss a book that is both a collection of stories and a novel

I read Olive Kitteridge for the first time this last weekend. The book had been recommended to me by a number of people, Porter Taylor and Robbin Whittington among them, and their enthusiasm along with several admiring reviews I read on line convinced me that the book would make good material for our group. I believe it will. I enjoyed Olive Kitteridge, as I imagine many of you did as well.

I also imagine that many of you are wondering how we’re going to talk about it, given its dual life as, on the one hand, a collection of stories, each independent to itself, and, on the other, a novel. How are we going to hold both kinds of storytelling in view, without losing focus?

Well, having consulted the wisdom of The Great Allan Campo, and having sat here for a while with a yellow pad and pencil, I have arrived at a plan (a plan! a plan!). I’m not sure it will work. But here goes.

Plan for Discussing Olive Kitteridge

1. Keeping the story-form in view through work we will do at home: The first way we’ll stay close to individual stories is through some very uncomplicated, not-too-time-consuming, potentially even fun, work we will do at home. This work is described in Question #1.

2. Keeping the story-form in view through a little teaching I’ll do at the beginnings of our meetings: Another way we’ll keep the story form in view will be to study two stories, one per meeting, for their “shapes.” What do I mean by shape? It’s complex. For now I will say that part of the way we experience stories, part of the way we come to understand them—and this is also true of poems—is through our senses. Very fine storywriters can make you feel their stories’ realities almost as though those realities were your own. They put you inside a sensory experience that is almost beyond thought. Elizabeth Strout accomplishes this sensory effect in “The Piano Player” from Olive Kitteridge, and I will try to describe that effect, and how it is achieved, at the beginning of our first meeting. And I will talk about another of the stories in O.K. at the second meeting—I just haven’t decided which one yet.

3. Olive Kitteridge as a novel: Probably the most straightforward approach to the book-as-a novel will be to track Olive’s story from beginning to end. Question #5, below, treats this dimension of the book, considering the order of the stories about Olive, and also the ways our impression of her story might be influenced by its being interspersed with stories about other residents of Crosby, Maine.

Okay, so that’s The Plan. Below are some questions to help us execute it.

Question #1: Each Discussant Collecting Four “Special Small Things” from Individual Stories

Okay, here’s some work, very uncomplicated, not too time consuming, possibly even fun, to do at home, which will help us stay close to individual stories.

Please go back through the book and select four “small special things” that seemed to you especially resonant, striking, moving, telling, suggestive, what have you, from Olive Kitteridge. Have these four small special things come from four different stories—-so, one detail per story (this means you’ll be coming to discussion with four stories represented by this exercise.) Please write brief accounts as to why these small things impressed you. Consider the life of that small thing within the story in which it appears. Also, perhaps this “small thing” matters somehow to another story in the book. How does it do so?

I realize the term “special small thing” is ridiculously vague. (I actually think I may have picked it up from all the smarmy, italicized-text, butterfly-‘n-sunrise Mother’s Day cards I read at Target this morning.) But I insist on that vagueness so as to invite the many ways Strout writes well, which is just about every way I’m aware of, at least from the kind of fiction she seems to be writing--a Chekhovian kind of fiction, and I’ll say more about the term “Chekhovian” when we meet. Also, the open-endedness of the term invites many kinds of reader response—and we are many kinds of reader. So, the term, “special small thing,” means pretty much anything that’s small: a cameo character, a detail of setting, a short exchange of dialogue, a particular phrasing or felicity of diction, a physical description, a tricky thing that happens with time—-what have you. And, so as to make my meaning concrete, I’m going to supply, right here, two of my own “small things.” My hope is that these two examples of “small things” should help you in the selection of your own.

So, here are two “small things” from Olive Kitteridge that seemed to me remarkable.

**First of Emilie’s “Small Things”

From the first story, “Pharmacy”:

I find myself very interested in the first paragraph of Olive Kitteridge, in the story, “Pharmacy.” And I find myself especially interested in it now that I’ve read the book through to the end. The paragraph describes Henry Kitteridge’s memory of his drive to work at his pharmacy. Here is the paragraph:

“For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summer-time roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy. Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.” (Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, 2008, Random Trade Paperback edition, p. 3)

Why this paragraph now seems to me remarkable—now, it should be re-emphasized, that I have read the book through to the end—is because the notion of Henry having a secret, a secret his wife, Olive, presumably knew nothing about, complicates the emotions I experienced while reading the last page of the book. Those emotions—the ones inspired by the last page--had to do with Olive’s recognition that one should honor one’s spouse while he or she is still with you, that one should honor the love in your life while it’s still “available.”

“No, if love was available, one chose it, or didn’t choose it. And if her platter had been full with the goodness of Henry and she had found it burdensome, had flicked it off crumbs at a time, it was because she had not known what one should know: that day after day was unconsciously squandered.” (270)

This is what Olive understands as she lies down next to Jack Kennison, a man who, in a wonderful contradiction to the “lesson” Olive seems to be learning, even leaving with her reader before she departs—Love Your Spouse--is not, of course, Olive’s spouse. Olive’s is a powerful insight, one we take away as we close the book—or, I do. But isn’t it remarkable that a book that should close with the bittersweet remembrance of the lost opportunity of spousal love should open with the spouse-of-that-spouse’s bittersweet remembrance of his lost “secret world”--a world recognized for its beauty, morning after morning—such was Henry Kitteridge; a world not squandered, rather regularly praised; and a world about to open onto another extra-spousal love affair, which would be Henry’s with Denise. It is a paradox like this one--resolute, irreconcilable, un-smooth-out-able--that seems to me distinctly Olive Kitteridge.

**Second of Emilie’s “Small Things”

From the story, “The Piano Player.”

This “small thing” is a character in “The Piano Player,” a peripheral one whose name is Walter Dalton. Walter, as you may remember, is at the bar every night that Angie plays piano. He is gay--Malcolm Moody refers to him as a “fairy”--and he is a career drunk. It would appear that he and Angie enjoy an affectionate, respectful relationship.

Walter struck me as a small-but-special presence in the story for a couple of reasons. One reason I’ll include here is that he seems to care for Angela in a respectful and “decent” way, a decency Angela recognizes, and appears to draw encouragement from, at the end of the story. Yet while Angie may be able to recognize that decency, Walter, being a drunk, and being a gay man in a world largely hostile to gay men, may not. This is why he seems to me a “telling” character. He seems a potentiality—a way Angela might end up if the many contingencies at play upon her life—drink, a history of abuse, loneliness, age--fall together unfortunately. Walter is an outline waiting for Angie to fill it, one among many. And yet—and this element of his character complicates things wonderfully--he seems happy with his lot, content. In trying to illuminate the many dimensions to Walter’s character and to his relationship to Angie, I wish to demonstrate how pressing at a small part of a good short story will often mean pressing at all of it.

Question #2: Strout’s fiction as character fiction: Being Led in the Writing Primarily by the Idiosyncrasies of Character

One of the things I admire about Olive Kitteridge is that it doesn’t make generalizations about life—-it doesn’t try to put forward one reading of existence that’s true for all of us. It describes dilemmas and characteristics many of us share, but it doesn’t have one, stabile, once-and-for-always, “true” lesson to teach us. (And already I can see, as maybe you can too, how these last two statements might be wrong.) If one can reasonably speak to a writer’s spirit—and of course one cannot!--Strout’s seems large and flexible enough to accommodate many kinds of human personality—-all kinds, it would seem. In this way her fiction most resembles, for me, the fiction of Anton Chekhov. Both writers are led in the composition of their stories by character—-by what is unique and irreducible in character personality, and by the material and social context (s) which influence character personality: class, money, gender, institutional background, economic and social opportunity (or the lack of it), and so on. (Race belongs on this list, but I’m not aware that Chekhov wrote about race, and if Strout has done so, I’m not yet familiar with that element of her fiction.) In Strout’s writing one senses that there isn’t a prevailing view or conclusion, except--and these are profound currents in Strout--respect for the dignity of all human beings, and belief in the powers of inspiration and love.

What are your thoughts, here? This is my first encounter with Strout’s fiction, so I could be totally wrong. Please support your observations with evidence from Olive Kitteridge.

Question #3: A complication to the last question: Talking together about the “profound insights into the human condition” offered by Olive Kitteridge

In the last question I proposed that Strout is led in her writing by character, rather than beliefs about people in general which she then imposes on her characters. (And there are a lot of writers working today proffering essentially one conclusion about human nature, or, to be fair, human nature in a particular time and place; and some of these are very good writers. But I for one don’t see the value of one-conclusion writing.) On the other hand, I do notice a couple of themes that seem to unify the stories in Olive Kitteridge. Do you? If so, what are they? In the blurb on the back cover of the book, for instance, it is said that, “Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition—its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.” What, for you, are those insights?

And yes, the hope here, in asking questions that nearly totally contradict one another, is to create a real mess.

Question #4: Pleasure

I know I experienced a lot of pleasure reading this book. I loved reading it, missed it when I wasn’t, and at various points had to put the book down for a good cry. Was the experience similar for you? Which stories especially moved you, which characters? If this book was a pleasure for you, how was it so? Please be specific to the book in your answer. This question may be totally fuzzy and un-focused, but I include it to create a space in discussion for our pleasure in the fiction we love.

And if this book was not a pleasure for you, let’s talk about that, too.

Question #5: How is Olive revealed across the book? And, how does the order of the stories influence our impression of her?

The book depicts a lot of different people, some of whom know one another, many of whom do not. If the book is unified in terms of narrative, it’s through the title character, Olive Kitteridge. You might go back and look at, first, how Olive is revealed--how, and in what order, information about her comes to you. And you might also contemplate how it is that her life and her responses to it ready her for the understandings she’s capable of by the end of the book. In pursuing these developments, you might look at the order of the stories and how that order effects your impression of Olive. For instance, it’s remarkable that the first story is not about Olive but about Henry, and that we won’t really get to know Olive-on-her-own-terms until story #4, “A Little Burst.” We’ll then encounter her in the next story, “Starving,” but not as a central character, rather as a cameo or peripheral one. And the way she behaves in story #4 (“Starving”) is very different from the way she behaves in story #3 (“A Little Burst”) or story #1 (“Pharmacy”). This question is meant as an invitation to do three things: A) to view Olive as an impression arrived at cumulatively, B) to view her story as a whole and to marvel at the distances she travels across it, and C) to marvel at the deliberations of a good writer who is trying to affect you in myriad ways, among them through the order in which she releases her information.

Question #6: The vision of the book: Individual and Communal/ Democratic at Once

How is your experience of Olive’s story influenced by its being situated in and among all the other stories in Olive Kitteridge? The vision here manages to be individual and democratic at once, this because of the form of the book: linked stories, the “link” being the town of Crosby, Maine. What is the effect of Olive’s story being interspersed with those of so many other people, some of whom she knows well, and some of whom she hardly knows at all? This question seems to overlap with Question 3, about the “insights into the human condition” offered by the book as a whole. What are your thoughts here?

Also, did Olive Kitteridge remind you of other works of fiction about whole towns: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio; George Eliot’s Middlemarch; Rick Russo’s Empire Falls; some of Alice Munro’s novella-length stories, like “The Love of a Good Woman”? (There are other linked collections about places or towns, but at the moment none is coming to mind.) (Oh yes, Tracy Winn’s wonderful Mrs. Somebody Somebody.) Each of these works lets you look at single individuals against other individuals whose stories hold the same “weight” or “intensity” as those around them, this because the “bigger” story is the town, is the place-we-all-share (which somehow becomes the “world” we all share, which somehow then becomes the “condition” we all share…very tricky, this.) In a way, any collection of short character fiction, one character treated per story, no one story holding precedence over the others, will, by its form, offer this democratic view. This form also offers the modern urban person obligated by the structure of his or her life to share space with strangers the chance to share fictional space with fictional strangers, and with the aid of authorial insight and/or compassion.

A development to this question: Thoughts about the narrator, her relationship to you, the qualities of her posture toward you and toward her characters.

Also, it’s interesting to think about how you-as-reader are implicated in the “vision” of the book. The only mind privy to all of the lives in Olive Kitteridge is yours—-yours, and the narrator’s. You and the narrator alone bear the responsibility of omniscience. There’s a particular (fill in the blank) poignancy to this responsibility? Is poignancy the right word? And while we’re at it, is responsibility the right word? Does being alone with the narrator in this comprehensive knowledge result in a kind of (fill in the blank)…loneliness? If the feeling is like loneliness, is it a loneliness that’s also somehow consoling? Or maybe there’s nothing like loneliness here, precisely because we get to share these understandings with the narrator. This notion then occasions reflection upon the narrator, upon the quality of her sympathy, the quality of her regard, the decisions she’s making, beneath your awareness, as to the aspects of her story she’s going to reveal, versus those she’ll leave un-said, etc. What are your thoughts, here?

Looking forward to seeing you on Monday,

Emilie