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This is the first in a series of reviews by different reviewers of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Olive, Again

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

Random House, 391 pp.

By Robert Allen Papinchak

The front cover of Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again says it’s a novel. But the texts between the front and back cover belie that label. The thirteen linked short stories suggest a collection of narratives that eventually coalesce into a coherent whole that presents itself as a novel but individually function as revealing character sketches of the inhabitants of Crosby, Maine, the small town setting for Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning predecessor, Olive Kitteridge (2003). It, too, was a series of thirteen interrelated stories that introduced the feisty, idiosyncratic math teacher.

As with the previous book, Olive is sometimes at the forefront of a chapter, sometimes just the thread that ties chapters together. Though she still displays a caustic wit and prickly personality, some of her edges have been softened and smoothed as she approaches her later years. The book follows Olive from 73 to 86. During that time, there are an awful lot of confidences revealed, kept, and broken as stories are told and lives change.

Olive, Again begins just after Olive Kitteridge ended. A mutual attraction between Olive and Jack Kennison, now a 74 year-old widower, starts shortly after her first husband, Henry, has died. It eventually leads to marriage. But before that the reader meets Jack, a former Harvard professor, in the opening story, “Arrested.” He has been stopped for speeding in an uninspected sports car.

As Strout does with most of the chapters, she relies on flashbacks to establish the characterization of the primary focus of each narrative section. The “old man with a sloppy belly,” recovering from prostate surgery, wonders if he has been living an “honest life.” It is an ethical question raised by many of the other residents of Crosby.

Still grieving after the recent loss of his wife, he recalls his and her previous dalliances. His altered both his academic career and his personal life. Hers appears to have been vengeance for his misstep. Jack’s ruminations lead him to put pen to paper to woo Olive despite the fact that he finds her incorrigible.

When Olive arrives on the scene in the next section, “Labor,” it is about an event that occurred two days before Jack’s arrest. Invited to a baby shower, the occasion gives her the opportunity to blurt out snide remarks about the conventions and traditions of the gathering. She casts aspersions on the gifts (a tiny sweater, a pair of booties) and the party events (ribbons taped to a paper plate). She sees it all as “such foolishness” until she relies on her “schoolteacher’s voice” to take control of the day when one of the guests goes into labor in the kitchen. This triggers memories of her own son and sends her to the phone to call Jack for emotional support.

Old means of communication those—a handwritten letter and a phone call—but they precipitate the relationship that endures throughout the book.

However, before Olive and Jack can live happily ever after, they must confront each of their children, Christopher and Cassie.

The grown children have their own emotional baggage to deal with. Neither is at ease with their separate parents. Christopher, a podiatrist, has moved to New York City where he lives with his second wife, Ann, and their bonded family. He rarely visits his mother. Cassie, who lives in San Francisco, visits her mother in a nursing home but avoids her father.

When Christopher and his family do visit Olive in “Motherless Child,” she discovers aspects of herself and Ann that she never could have expected. The source of Ann’s seemingly dismissive demeanor is based on grieving for an uninvolved mother. Olive is shocked to realize that her treatment of Christopher may have left him feeling motherless.

Olive’s sphere of influence has also affected other members of the community, some her past students.

“Cleaning,” “Helped,” “The Walk,” and “The Poet” expose the sadness, loneliness, and despondency that haunts many of the characters in the book. Melancholy memories surface. Confidences are divulged.

Kayley Callaghan cleans houses for wealthier Crosby residents, enduring class differences and sexual harassment. Olive’s tangential relationship with Kayley occurs when their paths cross at a nursing home where each is visiting a friend.

When Suzanne Larkin needs to be helped to cope with secrets buried in her past, she confides in her father’s lawyer about what went on behind closed doors at home. He, too, discloses how his own life has been “tainted with an easiness” that stretches back to his escape from Hungary. Their conversational exchanges become therapeutic sessions which acknowledge the “variety of secrets people had been keeping to themselves.”

With his fiftieth high school reunion looming, Denny Pelletier takes a long walk by a river, recollecting an unrequited love and “saddened by the waning of his life.”

Encountering the “sadfaced” hometown U.S. Poet Laureate during breakfast in a diner, Olive is startled when the “feminist, postmodernist, confessional poet” uses the outline of Olive’s life to imagine the “experience of being another” in one of her poems.

Strout brings back characters from previous novels. In “Exiles,” the Burgess brothers finally learn the truth about an early family tragedy that had defined their lives. And, in the final chapter, “Friend,” Isabelle Daignault (from Strout’s Amy and Isabelle) reappears in Olive’s current life at the Maple Tree Apartments assisted living complex.

It’s friends and family (those forgotten and estranged), love and lovers (remembered and missed), misery and happiness (forever intertwined) that Strout oversees in Olive, Again. The overall tone of the stories as novel is bittersweet, melancholy, and mordant.

As Sherwood Anderson did in the interconnected stories of Winesburg, Ohio, as Theodore Dreiser did in his short story, “The Old Neighborhood,” and as Thomas Wolfe admonished in You Can’t Go Home Again, Strout vividly conveys the delicate balance that exists between the desire to leave home and the desperate need to return in order to discover the everlasting trauma of memory. Olive, Again is a formidable American narrative.

Robert Allen Papinchak, a former university English professor, has reviewed a range of fiction in newspapers, magazines, journals, and online, including in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Seattle Times, USA Today, People, The Writer, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the New York Journal of Books, World Literature Today, The Millions, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Strand Magazine, Mystery Scene Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and others. He has been a judge for Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Creative Writing Contest, the Nelson Algren Literary Prize for the Short Story, and the John Leonard Prize for Best Book of 2018 for the National Book Critics Circle. His own fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received a STORY award. He is the author of Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction.