This is the second 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 Joan Silverman

In the preface to her stunning new book, Elizabeth Strout claims that she had no plan to revisit her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge. Then Olive showed up one day, made her presence known, and wouldn’t leave. So arrives the unintended sequel, Olive, Again, with its air of inevitability. Did we really think Olive was gone, consigned to the quiet outback of fictional Crosby, Maine? 

At the close of the original volume, Olive was a grieving widow, her husband having died following a stroke. Henry was the village pharmacist, kindly and mild—  the antithesis and frequent target of Olive’s crusty, acerbic ways. His loss, however, could never have prepared us for Jack, Olive’s second husband — a 70-something former Harvard professor who favors leather jackets and a sports car. His hail-fellow-well-met persona seems more like a character who dropped out of a Richard Russo novel. Their pairing makes for some great, if unexpected, chemistry. Finally, our protagonist encounters some pushback against what Jack aptly dubs her “Olive-ness.”

In this later stage of life, Olive is as tart and intractable as ever, but with more reason to be so: Age and infirmity have now settled into the mix. When the book opens, Olive is 70-ish, freestanding and independent; by the end, she’s 86, having withstood a recent heart attack and fall, with walker in hand, in an assisted living facility. She’s now twice-widowed, wondering whether Jack may have been “her real husband.” And time has softened her somewhat.

Which is not to say that the latter-day Olive has turned mushy, or “dopey-dope,” as she refers to addled seniors. But this aggressively provincial woman, with her exclamations of “Godfrey” and “ay-yuh,” peels back the mask, at times, to reveal surprising bandwidth — a more reflective side, depths of fellow-feeling, a penchant for the bleak beauty of Maine in winter.

This baker’s dozen of linked stories spans more than a decade, spotlighting sundry neighbors and their trials, but always circling back to its namesake character. Olive is the book’s central riddle, its paradox, and source of clarity. Yes, she’s still the quintessential crab whose conversation and relationships would benefit from a social filter, and whose candor continues to be her undoing. And, yet, when she gets out of her own way, entire worlds open up.

“What is your life like, Betty?” Olive asks a visiting nurse’s aide, who has crossed her more than once.

Betty’s primary offense was the bumper sticker she displayed on her truck, supporting Donald Trump. Adding insult to injury, she left a cigarette butt on Olive’s porch and treated a Somali aide dismissively. But when Betty speaks of her own difficult life, Olive listens. For the first time, she could see Betty as she was, in a larger framework.

“What a thing love was,” Strout writes. “Olive felt it for Betty, even with that bumper sticker on her truck.”  

Olive was an icon in her earlier incarnation, perhaps, in part, because she was an anachronism. She came across as a self-absorbed, difficult old woman well before her time. Now, in her 70s and 80s, she’s less singular and more of a stereotype — we all know seniors who remind us of Olive Kitteridge. Still, this book easily stands on its own, with Olive commandeering our attention both for her occasional insights and her perennial lack of insight.  

Or as Strout puts it, after a family blowup at Olive’s house: “She could not understand what it was about her, but it was about her that had caused this to happen. And it had to have been there for years, maybe all of her life, how would she know?”

At the end of the book, Olive has begun to record memories of her life on an electric typewriter that her son, Christopher, gave her. The simplicity of typewriter and paper, a few paragraphs on a sheet, provides enormous comfort. 

“I do not have a clue who I have been,” she types. “Truthfully, I do not understand a thing.”  

These closing words may sound like a belated identity crisis, filled with regret. Or perhaps this expression of self-doubt is a hopeful sign, an epiphany, spoken with the same bluntness that has ruled her whole life.

Throughout the book, Strout serves up slices of daily life in Crosby, Maine, alternating among the dark and disquieting, the ordinary and the numinous. Her hauntingly forthright stories have a fierce beauty all their own.   

Joan Silverman’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The Chicago Tribune, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Dallas Morning News. Her book, “Someday This Will Fit: Linked Essays, Meditations & Other Midlife Follies, has just been released by Bauhan Publishing.