Tell Me Everything – more than I wanted to know, and then some
Elizabeth Strout’s 2024 novel builds on the characters and setting of her earlier works, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge (2008). I came to the book without benefit of knowing those characters or the setting, not in print, not on screen. I found a copy of Tell Me Everything in the library, though, so I thought I’d check it out, in both senses.
It’s certainly not a traditional page-turner, and it took me a while to get accustomed to the digressions and diversions, the introduction of characters that seem unimportant but keep slipping back into the meanders of dialogue and discussion as the character Olive Kitteridge, now 90, and her younger storytelling and -listening companion Lucy Barton (the focal character in the acclaimed novel My Name is Lucy Barton from 2016), tell each other everything, well, not quite everything, they’ve heard about the goings-on of the other residents of this small town in Maine. We meet Bob and Jim Burgess, too, of The Burgess Boys (2013), now older and presumably wiser, but maybe not.
You – the reader – might long for the sugar-rush urge for an “inciting incident” that the books about storytelling, or its highfalutin neighbor “creative writing” think you need. (One of the best, I think, is Yorke, 2013.) It doesn’t come. But you’re in for a bittersweet bite of dark chocolate of a story, or lots of little bites, over all the time it takes to read, lot of little stories that overlap but elude connection. It’s art imitating life, rather than the hackneyed inversion that you often – as you consume fiction – wish were true.
You’re guided by a narrator who isn’t a character but sounds like one: an unintroduced and omnipresent but not quite omniscient observer in this lack of drama. You learn much, but probably not everything, about the miniature interior lives of the perfectly ordinarily rich and complex personalities in their domestic settings.
There are thus many stories we could tell about this form of storytelling, enough to fill volumes of literary theory and criticism. I’ll focus on two elements, one structural, the other of substance: What work does a narrator do? And one of many layers of theme that give life to that structure: What’s love?
Narrators
People who teach creative writing or write books about it will tell you about a variety of forms of narration:
There’s first-person, where the narrator is a character, and you learn the event through that character’s eyes.
Then, third-person, where the narrator stands above the action, pointing the reader to whatever is important to know.
There can be second-person narrators, too, but they’re not common, and can be annoying, where the narrator is talking at you, directing you, the reader, about what you should be thinking. I did a bit of that a couple of paragraphs ago.
Third-person narrators can also be “close,” expressing the inner thoughts of one or more characters, so you, the reader, can see inside the minds of the characters. Third-person-close narrators say things the characters can’t or won’t articulate.
What narrators are not supposed to do, however, is to have a voice, a life, of their own. But this one – the person telling us in Tell Me Everything – does.
This narrator’s voice sounds like a resident of a small town in Maine, of someone familiar with New York City and Long Island, with the airport, with the train to Boston. This voice can read and interpret the minds of Bob Burgess, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. Well, up to a point, up to the point when those minds overload and need to reboot, at which point the narrator’s mind reboots too. Here, Book 2, chapter 3, p. 124, the narrator is inside, outside, and then inside again:
Olive thought: Lucy honestly, you are too old to be boy-crazy. Lucy already had Bob Burgess—remember we have mentioned before that Olive believed those two to be in love—and Lucy also had her ex-husband, William. And she was still walking around looking for men? And only five people showed up to see her?
And then, a bit later, in Chapter 5, p. 144, the narrator straddles the divide between third person omniscience and interior monologue:
But Larry had always been different, and Bob thought: He should not have had Jim as a father.
Well.
There you are. A lot of people feel this way about their parents, and probably, thought Bob, a lot of parents feel this way about their kids.
However much this voice would like us to consider it a trustworthy guide, the narrator, too, seems unable to cope with the many moving parts in this story, the randomness and complexity. Something as mechanical as a plot can’t let us, or the narrator, be sure we will reach a tidy resolution of the puzzles of life, even of life in the pleasant, seemingly uncomplicated setting of a small town in Maine.
I’d welcome more narrators like this, like me when trying to work out whether there is meaning in the events in my life, in the events of the people I meet and get to know. A bit. At least.
Which brings us to the meaning of this story, or one of many.
Love
Elizabeth Strout lets us ponder love, directly, for a few minutes, in the middle of Tell Me Everything, and then lets the riddle rattle around with us for the rest of this story of many stories. Here’s a section in Book 2, Chapter 3, pp. 130-131, when Lucy tells Olive of a sense of love for a stranger, someone she had just met, and her sense that the feeling was mutual:
“And that was that. It took me about five full minutes to realize he had really made my day. I mean, you know, he was sort of touched.”
“Touched? You mean he was crazy?” Olive asked.
“No, I mean he was touched by God.”
Olive rolled her eyes. “I don’t believe in God. That’s all rubbish,” she said firmly.
“Okay, but think of this, Olive. If God is love, then this man was touched by God.”
Olive rolled her eyes again.
“And maybe you don’t believe in God—which is fine, but I don’t care—but you have been loved. And you love ...”
Olive then replies:
“Yes, I do, you’re right about that.”
Lucy gave a small shrug.
Their conversation then diverts, briefly, into loneliness, and Lucy puts on her coat to leave.
“Those are my stories.… But you’re right. They are stories of loneliness and love.”
These fragments of philosophy bounce off the walls that confine the domestic lives of these residents of a small town in Maine, a bit of the United States that attracts little attention from the rest of the machinations of superpower geo-politics to which Olive, Lucy, the Burgess brothers and Elizabeth Strout pay no attention. Because they bounce, because we, the readers, live in the world around us, those fragments of philosophy accrete meaning, gradually, as this story of stories meanders toward it final chapters.
As we head toward the conclusion, the last stop this novel will record on the continuing meanders of these characters, Larry Burgess, Jim’s son, falls out with his father over a family secret. Bob Burgess is dismayed. He tells his nephew (Book 4, Chapter 9, p. 276):
But right now, you have no sympathy from me. You are still too young. And you have had my sympathy your whole life, but when you say your father is evil, well, your father is not evil. Is he broken? Yes, we’re all broken. Frankly.
Toward lack of conclusions?
This fragile story of stories, this story of fragile people inhabiting a calm surface of a quiet backwater of America, tells us, slowly, of the turmoil that lies beneath that surface. Slowly. Gently. Respectfully. Consider this, from Book 4, Chapter 2, p. 225, two-thirds of the way through:
“Oh my God,” Lucy said. She sat up straight. And then she said, “So what is the point of this story? Pauline should have married the already married fisherman?”
Olive laughed. She really laughed at that. “Lucy Barton, the stories you told me—far as I could tell—had very little point to them. Okay, okay, maybe they had subtle points to them. I don’t know what the point is to this story!”
“People,” Lucy said quietly, leaning back. “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.”
“Exactly.” Olive nodded.
Exactly.
Yorke, J. (2013). Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them. London: Penguin.
Hi Donald--many thanks for sharing your experience with this new, Elizabeth Strout novel, which sounds a bit unfocused and even off-putting. Perhaps she is trying to do too much with a thin story and a cast of indistinct characters. Maybe she's trying to be too cute, when the well-established forms of narrative structure you so helpfully outlined actually serve the purposes of nearly any novelist. At least any one that I'm likely to read. As a reader, and in my own fiction, I have come to favor strong story told in an ongoing present tense with a limited-omniscient [3rd person] narrative that dips freely into indirect discourse providing readers with access to a character's thoughts and feelings, presenting them as if they're the character's own, and thereby creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy. But again--what story there is must be strong by which I mean engaging, i.e. "dramatic." John Updike's "Rabbit" novels and Hillary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" novels perfectly exemplify what I'm saying.
Dear Don, I have to say first that I’ve found Strout’s reputation to far outweigh her achievements. Her writing seems pretentious in its sheer (fake?) modesty. How ordinary can we be, she seems to ask with a sneer, but then, having recognised that she seems to think she is writing about my own and other readers’ ordinary lives I always feel the need to have another quick look to see if she has revised her opinion. From your critique of her latest clearly the answer is no. However, I enjoyed your careful, unpretentious and apparently not fake revelation of her method, if it can be called so. Why should narrative structure not unfold in as random a way as in real life? Why impose pattern when ‘reality’ is ‘one damn thing after another’ and the repetition of design is only how we choose to order our thoughts?
I appreciate your reference to John Yorke’s book but see the ideas we might entertain after Joyce, Woolf, Dos Passos et al can have a relevance today as Strout seems to show.
Thank you for encouraging me to rethink the point of structure. I shall go back and read her linked books in order (!)
CC