Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Also, Olive, Again. Books 3 and 4 — 4 stars each.

This is one of those books you see incessantly at the thrift store, and that has sat unread on my bookshelf for a very long time. I must admit that I assumed a book with the name of someone who sounds like a boomer was at least one generation old and probably not the kind of story I’d enjoy. I didn’t realize that Olive Kitteridge was a Pulitzer winner the year I started college, and is probably most notable for its modern structure: 13 nonlinear short stories connected only in their setting and sometimes indirect relationship to the titular Olive. Channeling Olive: Oh Godfrey, Hell’s bells and phooey to me for sleeping on this one!

Simply put, Olive Kitteridge weaves poignant tales about Olive and people connected to Olive in small town America. I think the author’s first key conceit is that rural communities are America — from concentrate. Squeeze real people into a tiny corner of the country such that everybody’s pulp touches everybody else’s pulp, and the thirteen sips you take are just that much stronger. The narrative structure of thirteen staccato stories helps a lot too; as the reader I felt the passage of time much more deeply through the implied negative space, compared to thirteen traditional chapters (Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs achieves a similar effect).

The second conceit, at least as a fan theory of mine, is revealed near the end of the first book in a passing comment of Olive’s: