Book review: Elizabeth Strout continues to achieve remarkable success with her richly charactered third-person stories. We live so deeply in the heads of her fictional creations that it’s easy to forget this isn’t all a first-person telling. The writer herself addresses us directly in the very first paragraph to inform that this is the story of Bob Burgess, 65, “who would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”
And that is the subtext of the rest of the novel – everyone has stories to tell about themselves or people they have known, often about the secrets they have kept buried. These stories fill this novel; even the characters who tell them talk about the multitudes of “unrecorded lives”.
Tell me Everything, it should be noted, will pose a problem for those who like to assign an author’s novels into certain series. Strout has two that have been running for the past 16 years; one about Olive Kitteridge and another about Lucy Barton. The novel Olive Kitteridge won Strout the Pulitzer fiction prize, and two Lucy Barton novels have made the longlist of the Booker Prize, one shortlisted. But this new work features Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, both of the Burgess boys and Isabelle Goodrow. Almost everyone from her previous 10 novels seems to put in an appearance. Not only are there husbands, wives, children and grandchildren, but a plethora of ex-wives and husbands, too.
At the heart of the novel is indeed Bob Burgess, a local lawyer on the verge of retirement. The setting is very firmly the state of Maine on the northeast coast of the US. The passage of its seasons forms a backdrop to the entire novel, marking time for the reader. Bob is persuaded to take another case, that of Matthew Beach, whose mother abruptly vanished one evening only to be found drowned in a car that was pulled from a local quarry lake. Matt is a single man in his late-50s who devoted much of his life to caring for his ageing mother. While unable to keep himself or his house clean, he does have a hidden talent. He paints accomplished studies of naked pregnant women. Reclusive and now alone, Matt might seem the perfect person to blame for the crime. Bob can see beyond this, and sets about a staunch defence.
Bob has made his life complicated. His marriage to Margaret is under strain, his first wife Pam has turned up seeking his help, and worst of all, he seems to have fallen in love with the writer Lucy Barton. Bob’s older brother, Jim, has just lost his wife, and all the tensions about the death of their father resurface to haunt both brothers.
Alongside all these trials and tribulations, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge meet regularly in Olive’s retirement home. They tell each other stories, often drawn from their own pasts, stories of unrecorded lives but also the events they cannot fully explain or understand. Beneath many stories in the book lurks the fear of loneliness and abandonment. In a paragraph, we hear the question of how difficult it is to exist without being touched or held by another person.
The simplicity of this book is deceptive; there are many complex themes below the surface and many unpleasant aspects of life which are concealed. Strout is a master of leaving us with just enough disquiet to hint and to unsettle, without marring the flow of the narrative with too many unsavoury details.
Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout (Penguin, $38), is out now.
