Olive Kitteridge

In my last blog, I pretty much admitted that I am a snob, but after reading Elizabeth Strout's latest book, Olive Kitteridge, I realize there is hope for me to become a more tolerant, if not better person. The bad news is, I might have to wait until I'm 74.
It takes Olive about that long to let down her guard and become the sort of person who can get along with others. Apparently her inability to do so hasn't really crimped her style in her years in the small town of Crosby, Maine. Olive is the center of this collection of linked short stories. She is like the relative that everyone fears or tries to avoid at Thanksgiving, but grudgingly admires for speaking her mind and she is a piece of work in this book.
Olive's husband, Henry is the one everyone loves, and he loves Olive in spite of the fact that she is the sort of woman who would steal clothes from her new daughter-in-law just BECAUSE SHE CAN (oh yes, and because her son has chosen the wrong sort of woman for Olive...oh, I mean for himself). The sabotaging of the first daughter-in-law is horrifying(the theft is not the worst of it) and hard to read because I wanted to like Olive, to see what Henry sees, but we have to wait a long time for that.
The other characters in here are interesting (I only skimmed through one story) though the connection to Olive can often seem contrived. If not everyone is old, they mostly seem old so I would say Strout didn't vary her voices enough. There's a lot there, though.
What if you came back to your hometown to kill yourself and had to save someone instead? What if your mother was a former beauty queen who insisted on still living as she did when she was a hardscrabble trailer kid(complete with "weird' plumbing and a shotgun)? What if you found yourself happily in retirement and in love and you found out your husband had had an affair (and not too long ago)? Or what if he suddenly suffers a massive stroke, just on an ordinary day and you had to realize no one really likes you without him?
But Olive comes out all right in the end, even if she does end up friends with a...gasp!...Republican.

Nice image: "They had fun these days...It was as if marriage had been a long, complicated meal, and now there was this lovely dessert."