The Joy of Elizabeth Strout

I’ve just finished reading Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, and reaching the final page I felt genuinely bereft to be finishing the novel, having to exit Strout’s imaginary world and re-enter the real one.

This isn’t always my response to reaching the end of a book. I read a lot of dense non-fiction and I read a lot for work; finishing a book, even if I’ve really enjoyed it, often feels like the relief of having achieved something, checked an item off my to-do list. But with Strout, I’m reminded of the feeling I used to have as a child, sitting out in the garden of the house I grew up in Gloucestershire, inhaling a stack of fantasy or spy novels — Discworld, Alex Rider, Harry Potter. These were not novels I read but novels I inhabited, whose characters felt like my friends and companions.

Elizabeth Strout, if you haven’t read her novels, builds worlds with as much commitment and consistency as any fantasy writer. Set almost entirely on the East Coast of the United States, in a set of rural, fictional towns, her characters will walk out of one novel and into the next. The more she’s written, the more collisions occur: between the cantankerous and large-hearted Olive Kitteridge, the intelligent and tentative Lucy Barton, the generous, self-deprecating Bob Burgess. Major characters from one novel will turn up as pieces of gossip or as a passing mention in the next, and the lives of minor characters will go on to develop their own whole, huge narrative arc.

The novels are domestic and realist in the sense that their focus is the everyday. Whole, lived tragedies will emerge from minor mishaps — a piece of broken crockery unlocking a lifetime of unresolved grief, a bad haircut forestalling a love affair, a spilt ice-cream exposing the limits of a mother’s love for her son. The engine of Strout’s narrative hinges on miscommunication, embarrassment, of things unsaid, and while great calamities do strike — deaths, murders, abuses, poverty and betrayals — alongside those minor disasters, Strout’s world is so vast an organism that life, in general, goes on.

This is the great, profound comfort of Strout’s novels. Not one of her characters is not flawed, not one of them is not lonely or longing or lost in some way or other. There they all are, beset by their losses and tragedies and disasters, simply doing their best to get from one day to the next, nothing more remarkable than that, and each of them remarkable in their ordinariness. And, for all their struggles, they still manage to find each other, and we, reading them, manage to find our way to them.

With love, Rosie x