Review: Flawed, damaged and difficult – just like real life

Viking, £16.99

The pandemic has only recently passed, Russia is at war with Ukraine and the political gulf in America is yawning ever wider. When Bob, the main character in Tell me Everything, thinks about the state of the country these days, “he sometimes had the image of a huge tractor trailer rumbling down the highway and the wheels, one by one, falling off.”

While Bob is the centre of the novel, Olive Kitteridge, one of Elizabeth Strout’s best-known characters, plays a key role. Now elderly and living in an apartment in a retirement community, she is still the spiky, outspoken, unkind, self-centred but occasionally perceptive and vulnerable woman around whom two earlier novels - Olive Kitteridge (made into a film starring Frances McDormand) and Olive, Again - revolved. She found lockdown difficult, at times thinking she “would go absolutely batty”.

In Tell me Everything, the latest in Strout’s ever-expanding series set in Crosby in Maine, Olive is central to the novel’s meaning, even if she features only intermittently. Those familiar with the Pulitzer-prizewinning Strout’s work will know, of course, that her attention swivels like an arc-lamp on a loose hinge towards different members of her cast, whose lives she follows book after book.

There are shades of Trollope’s sagas or Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time in Strout’s fixation on this town and its people. Despite the risks of over-ploughing the same field, she returns again and again to the same territory, always managing to find fresh stories to tell. There’s no need to have read Strout’s previous books to enjoy this one, but if you have then Tell me Everything will feel like encountering old friends and neighbours, as they dip in and out of the limelight.

This time, her attention is on Bob Burgess who, with his brother Jim, featured in The Burgess Brothers. Theirs was a tragic childhood, since as a child Bob slipped the gearstick on his father’s stationary car, which rolled down the drive and crushed him to death. Strout opens with a description of a man who has never forgiven himself. A tall, heavyset 65-year-old, “Bob has a big heart but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumed to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”

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That sentence encapsulates Strout’s philosophy, the spark that ignites her interest in people’s inner lives. As she well knows – indeed, as we all know – everybody has a story. Her mission is to winkle that out, showing how complex, fascinating and at times troubling even the most ordinary-seeming person’s existence is.

Married to Margaret, a rather pompous Unitarian minister, Bob has been “struggling” in recent months. Among his few pleasures are regular walks with another of Strout’s familiar characters, the writer Lucy Barton. This friendship is platonic, or so they both assume until gradually each grows unsettled by how essential the other has become.

Lucy is from New York, but is now living in Crosby with her ex-husband William (forgiven for his former infidelities). Because of her occupation she is viewed with suspicion by the community, even though “nobody seemed to have anything bad to say about her”. Is she Strout’s alter ego? Does her all-seeing eye and her thirst for knowing what makes people tick mirror her author? It would be presumptuous to assume so; better instead to see Barton as the embodiment of the scavenging instinct that most novelists possess, some carrying notebooks wherever they go in which to record snippets of overheard conversations or true stories they could transform into fictional gold.

The thread of Tell me Everything comes from Olive, who one day invites Lucy to visit in order to tell her a story about her family. Initially Olive is raspy: “You don’t look a bit like your photograph on your books.” But soon she is relating the tale of her mother’s first ill-fated romance, and the repercussions only Olive ever knew about. When Lucy leaves, Olive is struck by the phrase she used, about “unrecorded lives”. As the pair meet again on several occasions, Strout underlines her own interest in the richness of experience that lies behind the public image of everybody you will ever meet.  

(Image: Tell Me Everything)

In all her novels, Strout’s prose is folksy and conversational, sometimes excessively so. It is jarring to read prosaic sentences such as: “Here is what had been happening to Pam”, or “But before they had their next walk together, this happened”. Dialogue is relayed with a surfeit of saids, like a friend tediously recounting an anecdote: “‘That’s okay,’ Bob said. ‘Now promise me something,’ Helen said, and Bob said, ‘Of course.’” Anne Tyler, whose small-town, middle-class beat shares similarities with Strout’s, has a style that is effortlessly readable but also elegant. Strout’s is more like Olive: direct to the point of blunt.   

Yet despite its downbeat, unpretentious and occasionally preachy tone, this novel, like her others, is compelling. There is nothing sensational about it apart from Strout’s ability to convey character as if that person were in the room with us. Here are people as found in real life: flawed, damaged and difficult but also capable of being kind, warm and generous. Various of her plotlines are heart-rending, including that of a lonely middle-aged man accused of murdering his mother, whom Bob, a lawyer, agrees to defend in court.

The plotlines of each of the characters are the hooks on which the novel hangs. Its deeper significance, however, comes less from events and drama than from moments of emotional illumination that change the direction of her characters’ lives, in this case Bob’s. Recognising Lucy’s importance to him, he realises it is partly because she truly listens to him. “It was one of Bob’s adult understandings: people did not care, except for maybe one minute. It was not their fault, most just could not really care past their own experiences.” It is Strout’s ability to care deeply for her characters that allows her readers to do likewise.