Elizabeth Strout | Thornfield Hall

Elizabeth Strout’s Tell Me Everything brought tears to my eyes. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize, this gracefully-written, moving novel brings together characters from Strout’s previous books, including Lucy Barton, a successful writer who moved from New York to Maine with her ex-husband William during the pandemic, and Olive Kitteridge, the cranky retired schoolteacher in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge.

Set in the small town of Crosby, Maine, Strout’s latest tells the stories of Maine natives as well as newcomers. Perhaps my favorite character is Bob Burgess, a lawyer who is Lucy’s best friend. An accusation of accidental patricide shaped his childhood. His older brother was responsible for the accident, but Bob, who is still confused about it, took the fall. In the course of the novel, Bob saves a gentle introvert, Matt, from a charge of matricide. Although Bob doesn’t think about it, he is saving himself as well as Matt.

There is almost a romance in this novel. A gentle love story unfolds during Lucy and Bob’s long walks. Will they become romantically involved, we wonder? They seldom touch each other and never kiss, because Bob is married to Margaret, a minister with whom he isn’t getting along at the moment, and Lucy is living with her ex-husband William, a self-centered, obsessive parasitologist. Lucy and Bob are loyal and reluctant to judge others, but if only…

Then there’s grouchy Olive Kitteridge, the heroine of Strout’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Olive Kitteridge. Olive was a teacher in Crosby for many years. Now she is in her 90s, complains that her son hates her because he never visits, and laments the changes in the culture. But her best friend lives in a nearby retirement home, so she is not alone. Lucy enters her life, because Olive tells Bob she has a story to tell Lucy. Lucy refers to Olive’s fascinating stories of local people as “unrecorded lives.”

It could be said that the main theme of the book is unrecorded lives. There is a link between fiction and these unrecorded lives. Oral storytelling is different from writing, but how different is it really? Olive tells stories of tragedy, romance, fortitude, stoicism, and, occasionally, death. Lucy is the repository of these stories. Olive has chosen well.

Strout’s graceful, carefully-shaped sentences are a pleasure to read. She has won several prizes in the U.S., including the Pulitzer Prize, but the esteem of the Women’s Prize judges is another distinction. I hope she wins!

The planet is so hot, it’s hard to imagine its getting hotter.   It was 100 degrees today, and it feels blazing, impossible.

But in addition to suffering the heat, I’ve been in a lot of pain this summer. I injured myself during a power yoga session. Remember aerobic dance classes? This was similar, only with yoga moves. I felt my ribcage rattling at one point. For over a month, my ankles were swollen, and I could hardly bend my knees or wrists.

I am now the queen of modified calisthenics: leg stretches and gentle weight-lifting. Some days I managed to walk a mile (in pain), other days I could barely make it around the block. One day I considered crawling home, but my knees weren’t bending properly.

I am almost 100 percent, but I couldn’t have gotten through it without Advil, calcium pills, gentle workouts, and some great books.

HERE ARE THREE BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS.

CRIME FICTION: The greatest American fiction being written today is crime fiction. (I’m not the first to say this.) And Sara Paretsky, author of the V.I. Warshawki series, is the best American writer working today, says I.

Her savvy, tough P.I. is V.I. Warshawski, a native Chicagoan and a cop’s daughter who became a lawyer and then opened her own P.I. office. In Paretsky’s latest novel, Overboard, V.I.’s dogs run away from her on a walk along Lake Michigan and find an injured girl in a cave. The girl is taken to a hospital, and the case is turned over to the police, but it keeps coming back to haunt V.I. The police thinks she’s holding out on them. Really great writing, and if you know Chicago, or even if you don’t, her precise, deft prose will vividly recreate it.

BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE: I reread Elizabeth Strout’s stunning novel, Oh William!, longlisted for the Booker. Her sentences are so graceful that they give a new meaning to the word “grace.” Yet her characters have lived through a lot of pain, and her lyrical sentences balance that in a way, not to make it palatable, but so that we can see their complexity more clearly.

Oh William! is a sequel to My Name Is Lucy Barton. Lucy’s ex-husband William’s second wife and their daughter have left him, and he invites Lucy to accompany him on a road trip to investigate his mother’s past. He has just learned that before his mother left her first husband, a farmer, to marry William’s father, a German P.O.W., she had had a baby daughter. He never knew he had a sister. Can anything good come out of such a trip? It’s not a Hallmark movie.
Do read this because Lucy is good company.

HUMOR WRITING: I had read very few of P.G. Wodehouse‘s standalone novels, until I found a “Best of” list by Robert McCrum, one of Wodehouse’s biographers. Piccadilly Jim is hilarious. There are the usual imposters – Jim, a practical joker always in the society columns, changes his name so he can have a chance with a beautiful, bright American girl who scorns the antics of Piccadilly Jim. Imagine his surprise when he meets her family’s new butler – and it is his father, who has fled his wife in England because he couldn’t bear to miss another baseball season. I kept tipping back my head and laughing. I don’t remember ever tipping my head before – that shows how funny Wodehouse is, I guess!