Recent Reading: Olive Kitteridge

 

I enjoyed reading Elizabeth Strout's novel Olive Kitteridge a few days ago. The book is a collection of connected or related stories that span probably 25 years that mostly involve the title character, Olive Kitteridge and other residents of the small town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is a character in all of the stories, and she is the main character in most of them, but not all of them. There was also a miniseries based on these stories that aired on HBO. The miniseries was faithful to the Olive in the book, but I must say that Frances McDormand, who played Olive, looks nothing like the Olive in the book -- McDormand is thinner and, well, probably better looking. McDormand, at least as I saw it, was a little nicer and a little funnier than the book version. Having seen the miniseries years before I read the book, I found it hard to separate the two versions at times.

Olive taught math at her local middle school for many years, although she never seems to particularly like, or even understand, children and teenagers. Olive is married to Henry, a kindly pharmacist with a heart of gold. She thinks Henry is naive and unable to understand the nature of the world like she can. However, Olive is not really a deep-thinking philosophical type. Olive is focused on solving the day's crisis and not thinking much beyond that.

One night, after a large restaurant meal, Olive desperately needs to use a toilet for an imminent bowel movement and convinces Henry to stop at the closest place with a toilet -- the local hospital. However, shortly after using the toilet, Olive and Henry are kidnapped by two young men attempting to rob the hospital. The police eventually come and Olive and Henry escape unharmed, at least physically unharmed. But Olive finds herself thinking about her marriage differently after that robbery.

They would never get over that night. And it wasn't because they'd been held hostage in a bathroom -- which Andrea Bibber would think was the crisis. No, they would never get over that night because they had said things that altered how they saw each other. And because she had, ever since then, been weeping from a private faucet inside her, unable to keep her thoughts from the red-haired boy with his blemished, frightened face, as in love with him as any schoolgirl, picturing him at his sedulous afternoon work in the prison garden; ready to make him a gardening smock as the prison liason had told her she could do, with the fabric she bought at So-Fro today, unable to help herself, as Karen Newton must have been with her man from Midcoast Power -- poor, pining Karen, who had produced a child who'd said, "Just because you're my grandmother doesn't mean I have to love you, you know."

(This event is an example of what Karl Jaspers would have called a boundary situation. A boundary situation is an extreme event that causes one to rethink one's life. Typical examples include marriage, birth of a child, losing a joh, or one's own impending death. Being a victim of a violent crime would count as a boundary situation, at least in my opinion.)

Personally, I found Olive to be fun to read about. But she can be quite caustic. Here is how she describes her son's new wife to her husband, Henry.

"Well, She's a big girl," said Olive. "Your new daughter-in-law. Graceful as a truck driver. A little dumb, I think. Something I can't put my finger on. But nice. You'd like her. You two would get along fine."

Later, Olive has this conversation with her son Christopher:

She called Christopher in New York. "How are you?" she said, angry because he never called.

"Fine," he said. "How are you?"

"Hellish," she answered. "How's Ann and the kids?" Christopher had married a woman with two children and now there was his. "Everyone still walking?"

"Still walking," Chris said. "Crazy hectic."

She almost hated him then. Her life had once been crazy and hectic, too. You just wait, she thought. Everyone thinks they know everything, and no one knows a damn thing.

I am not sure that I would enjoy having to interact with Olive Kitteridge on a day-to-day basis, in real life. She sounds exhausting. But I did enjoy reading about her.