Olive Kitteridge : a Novel by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge…self righteous, passionate, and without regret, a character that we can all share a piece of. The way this novel is shaped out pushes you into these characters sometimes deeper than you would like to go. I felt such sympathy and admiration for many of these otherwise nameless faces. One of the excerpts of the story that really spoke to me was a beautifully written passage internalized by one of the characters whom had been brought back to his childhood home by certain remembrances.

” What he began to want was to see his childhood house— a house he believed, even as he sat in his car now, that he had never once been happy in . And yet, oddly, the fact of its unhappiness seemed to have a hold on him with the sweetness of a remembered love affair. For Kevin had some memories of sweet brief love affairs. None measured up to the inner desire, the longing he felt for that place…”

In those few words spoken in Kevin’s narrative I knew him. I identified but more than that I committed those words to my own experience and that’s what drew me in.

For me it was the identity of all of these characters in Elizabeth Strout’s novel that kept me involved. The integrity held by these bystanders of life. The genuine existence that hangs at the end of each one of our ropes.