by James Wallace Harris, 9/24/24
I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Strout. I just finished her new book that came out just a couple of weeks ago, Tell Me Everything. It was wonderful. Now I could just say to you, “Go out and read it,” but that’s problematic. This is Elizabeth Strout’s tenth book, and it includes characters that have been in eight of her other novels.
Tell Me Everything is mostly about Bob Burgess, and it includes his brother Jim. They were featured in The Burgess Boys (2013). Bob was also in Lucy by the Sea (2022). Lucy Barton’s first book is My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), and her story continued in Anything is Possible (2017), Oh William! (2021) and Lucy by the Sea, and she’s one of the main characters in Tell Me Everything. Elizabeth Strout’s most famous character is Olive Kitteridge who first appeared in Olive Kitteridge (2008), and her story continued in Olive, Again (2019), but she’s also a minor character in Lucy by the Sea and Tell Me Everything.
One of the exciting things about reading Tell Me Everything is Lucy and Olive meet and become friends. Olive is 90 when the story starts and 91 at the end, but we’ve known her since she was in her fifties, working as a teacher. She’s now in assistant living facility. We’ve followed Lucy for most of her life, and she’s now in her mid-sixities in Tell Me Everything.
I believe the title of the new novel comes from Lucy’s and Olive’s relationship where they tell each other stories about people who have unrecorded lives. But also, because Strout tells her novels by having characters tell their stories to each other. (I must wonder if Strout makes up all these stories, or are they based on stories from people she has known?)
Tell Me Everything is a fine novel to read without having read all the other novels, but you won’t get the full Elizabeth Strout impact unless you’ve read her novels in order. Tell Me Everything reiterates many of the major details of the previous novels but I’m not sure the characters will have the same impact. Bob, Lucy, and Olive in the new book are like the tips of icebergs, very impressive, but you don’t get to see them below the waterline.
The two Olive Kitteridge books are collections of thirteen short stories each, twenty-six stories in all. Sometimes Olive is the point-of-view character, and sometimes she just makes a cameo in other people’s stories. She’s not a featured character in Lucy by the Sea or Tell Me Everything. And she’s a lot more than the character people get from wonderful Frances McDormand’s portrayal of her in the HBO miniseries. Olive is immensely multidimensional. But to understand her requires experiencing all those layers. Many people, the other characters in the novels, and readers who read Strout’s books, hate Olive because she’s so abrasive. I love Olive.
We met Lucy in My Name is Lucy Barton which is a fictional memoir told in first person. It sounds like a monologue by Lucy in audiobook. But in Anything is Possible, we hear about Lucy’s childhood through a series of stories told by people who knew Lucy growing up. Oh William! returns to the fictional memoir style, with Lucy telling her story like a long monologue again. That style continues in Lucy by the Sea. In Tell Me Everything, Strout returns to third person, and Lucy is being observed again, especially by Bob Burgess.
Strout is not an omniscient narrator. We learn about characters from the opinions of other characters, and the opinions we form. It would be interesting if Strout wrote a book about her characters using the 19th century style god view of characters.
Lucy is also a complex character who is an observer of other people. And although Olive observes other people, she isn’t as insightful as Lucy. In Tell Me Everything, Lucy teaches Olive about learning and telling other people’s stories, and we see Olive become a much better observer. Lucy is also very philosophical, but not in a deep intellectual sense. Lucy works to make sense of reality through understanding the emotional experiences of others. Bob often thinks Lucy is naive and childlike, but is she?
We got to know Bob in The Burgess Boys, a third person novel. However, this approach doesn’t move far away from Strout’s basic writing technique of writing novels by collecting anecdotes about other people.
Most novels are about something big. Something dramatic. Strout’s books are about ordinary people who have suffered or are suffering ordinary kinds of experiences and emotions that we all suffer. Most of her characters had troubled childhoods. Some of her characters like Lucy, were quite poor growing up. But other characters are well-to-do or become successful. This makes Strout’s novels feel they are about class. Some reviewers make a lot out of the class angle, but I don’t.
Tell Me Everything is about unrequited love, death, murder, child abuse, jealousy, marriage, infidelity, friendships, aging, careers, art, counseling, fashion, resentment, feelings, emotions, alcoholism, understanding the past, reading other people, nude pregnant women, and much more. As Bob Burgess says, of Lucy’s stories about other people, they are about life.
I know some readers don’t like Strout because her books are about ordinary aspects of life. They don’t involve exciting page turning plots. I find them quite thrilling because they make me think about people and myself.
I’m about to start the third of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, which began with the international bestseller, My Brilliant Friend. They are also about ordinary people involving a lot of characters. I find both series appealing because of what might be considered a sexist take on them. I feel they give me women’s insight into reading emotions. Me, and my guy friends don’t read emotions like the women characters in these novels. I don’t know if this ability is a common trait of all women, or just women writers. But it’s why I like both writers.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 