Strout’s fiction has an unlikely appeal. In “Writing the Other America,” a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra notes Strout’s interest in the lives of the very old as well as the very poor. But whatever else she is writing about, she is always writing about loneliness. As children, Lucy Barton and her siblings were shunned because they smelled. Lucy also knows the loneliness of being a born writer in an environment that had little use for her sensitivity. Bob Burgess is isolated by extreme guilt: For most of his life he has believed himself responsible for an accident that killed his father. Olive Kitteridge has been lonely in both marriage and widowhood, and is pretty much a lifelong community outcast. Though Strout peers into these lives with warmth and compassion (and favors cozy titles like Tell Me Everything and Anything Is Possible), she has tended to do so without sentimentality.
And yet her recent novels, including the latest, are not as adept at treading that line. Tell Me Everything revolves mostly around Olive and Lucy, who sit and swap stories, and Bob and Lucy, who walk and do the same (they started strolling together during the pandemic), but there are several subplots. In one of them, Bob’s brother, Jim, is catapulted by a son’s accident into “another world, a world where all he felt was love and sorrow, and yet the love was stronger than the sorrow.” Strout describes this period in elated, somewhat soppy terms:
It was strong, and when his girls came to visit, he felt as though the country he had been living in had shifted abruptly, and for whatever reasons—was it a gift from God?—he was now in an altogether different country, and it was a country of purity.
Jim feels this way for two weeks, which seems about right. Strout’s omniscient narrator spends the entire novel in this state, overwhelmed by fellow feeling and often sounding indistinguishable from Lucy Barton herself. Lucy, in a one-sentence paragraph from Strout’s previous novel: “Everyone needs to feel important.” The narrator in Tell Me Everything, another stand-alone sentence: “And who—who who who in this whole entire world—does not want to be heard?”
If Strout was once a master at portraying quiet lives in a big way, letting them unfold and trusting readers to draw their own conclusions, she now relies on easy plays for emotional connection and tidy resolution.
Jim feels this way for two weeks, which seems about right. Strout’s omniscient narrator spends the entire novel in this state, overwhelmed by fellow feeling and often sounding indistinguishable from Lucy Barton herself. Lucy, in a one-sentence paragraph from Strout’s previous novel: “Everyone needs to feel important.” The narrator in Tell Me Everything, another stand-alone sentence: “And who—who who who in this whole entire world—does not want to be heard?”
If Strout was once a master at portraying quiet lives in a big way, letting them unfold and trusting readers to draw their own conclusions, she now relies on easy plays for emotional connection and tidy resolution.Jim feels this way for two weeks, which seems about right. Strout’s omniscient narrator spends the entire novel in this state, overwhelmed by fellow feeling and often sounding indistinguishable from Lucy Barton herself. Lucy, in a one-sentence paragraph from Strout’s previous novel: “Everyone needs to feel important.” The narrator in Tell Me Everything, another stand-alone sentence: “And who—who who who in this whole entire world—does not want to be heard?” If Strout was once a master at portraying quiet lives in a big way, letting them unfold and trusting readers to draw their own conclusions, she now relies on easy plays for emotional connection and tidy resolution.Jim feels this way for two weeks, which seems about right. Strout’s omniscient narrator spends the entire novel in this state, overwhelmed by fellow feeling and often sounding indistinguishable from Lucy Barton herself. Lucy, in a one-sentence paragraph from Strout’s previous novel: “Everyone needs to feel important.” The narrator in Tell Me Everything, another stand-alone sentence: “And who—who who who in this whole entire world—does not want to be heard?”
If Strout was once a master at portraying quiet lives in a big way, letting them unfold and trusting readers to draw their own conclusions, she now relies on easy plays for emotional connection and tidy resolution.Jim feels this way for two weeks, which seems about right. Strout’s omniscient narrator spends the entire novel in this state, overwhelmed by fellow feeling and often sounding indistinguishable from Lucy Barton herself. Lucy, in a one-sentence paragraph from Strout’s previous novel: “Everyone needs to feel important.” The narrator in Tell Me Everything, another stand-alone sentence: “And who—who who who in this whole entire world—does not want to be heard?”
If Strout was once a master at portraying quiet lives in a big way, letting them unfold and trusting readers to draw their own conclusions, she now relies on easy plays for emotional connection and tidy resolution.