Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge are two worlds I never imagined colliding. It’s as if Batman and Spider-Man decided to drop by on Superman. But Elizabeth Strout’s universe, despite its insistence on its own plain-speaking ordinariness, is a strange and wondrous place, and she makes the meeting of Lucy and Olive seem perfectly natural.
You don’t need to have read Strout’s earlier work or know her recurring characters’ backstories to make sense of Tell Me Everything, for she includes enough information to get by perfectly well. Set in Maine, the novel opens by declaring itself the story of sort-of retired attorney Bob Burgess, one of Strout’s long-standing protagonists. Bob believes his life isn’t worth documenting. (The narrator disagrees: “But he does; we all do.”) The cracks in community and empathy exacerbated by the pandemic are evident; people have weathered the same storm only to find themselves still in different boats. Bob is anxious in a way that is new to him, which he discusses with his friend Lucy Barton. They meet regularly, conversing in a way neither can do with their partners. “Don’t think about it,” is the running joke between them, because both are terrible overthinkers.
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When eighty-six-year-old Gloria Beach disappears from the isolated house she shares with her son Matt, Bob becomes tangled up in the murder investigation that follows. Lucy too has her own field of inquiry: despite an unpromising initial meeting at Olive’s retirement community (Olive tells Lucy she found her memoir “a little self-pitying”; Lucy thinks Olive is a bully, and “bullies are always frightened”), the two women form an unlikely alliance.
They share stories about people they have known – some well, some slightly – “unrecorded lives”, Olive calls them. These stories often centre on adults who have failed their children, and what happens when those childrenbecome adults. Do we tell stories to explain ourselves to others, or to illuminate our own motivations, Strout asks. Perhaps the answer lies in Lucy’s belief: “People always tell you who they are if you just listen.”
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This beguiling, memorable novel untangles the human heart with honesty and wit, knowing that untying one knot merely reveals another. “People are mysteries,” Lucy tells Olive. “We are all such mysteries.”
Henrietta McKervey is an author and critic
