Elizabeth Strout is a faculty member at Queen’s University, Charlotte, NC, with short stories published in many magazines. She was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the English Orange Prize. Her books Abide with Me and Amy and Isabelle won prizes. And Olive Kitteridge won the Pulitzer Prize.

The back cover’s summary is fairly good: “At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life – sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition – its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.”

Since this book is more like a collection of thirteen short stories, with Olive a continuous thread in each, the above summary comments on only four of the persons who are the main protagonists in four of the stories. Olive, a tall, somewhat stout woman who is blunt with the “ruthless honesty” of her perception of how things should be, is often quite intimidating to anyone, both family and friends. But I saw in these stories a person who was an amalgam of people I knew in my home town, where everybody eventually knows what everybody else is up to, but seldom has any detailed or accurate knowledge of why. In the person of Olive, however, Elizabeth Strout has endowed Olive (mainly for the readers’ sake) with a bit more knowledge of townsfolk’s reasons, which makes Olive a very interesting character. At first I didn’t care for her lack of tack and ability to see and offer comfort to those who needed it, but Olive begin to grow on me, especially in the last few stories in which she is the main protagonist, facing dire problems herself.

I feel that it is the variety of interesting characters that populate these thirteen Olive-linked short stories that made my appreciation of this novel grow steadily with each new story. Elizabeth Strout has demonstrated here the ability that is essential to a collection of short stories – the ability to make the characters both understandable (usually) and interesting in a score (or thereabouts) of pages. Also, besides the main thread that is Olive herself, some characters, such as her husband Henry and her son Christopher, become both threads and the main characters in some of the latter stories. I agree with a San Francisco Chronicle reviewer’s comment about Olive: “Funny, wicked and remorseful, Mrs. Kitteridge is a compelling life force, a red-blooded original. When she’s not onstage, we look forward to her return. This book is a page-turner because of her.” I must add to this that Olive is a page-turner whose character grows in both depth and understandability with each story. I give this book a very strong recommendation.