Elizabeth Strout’s readers have spent nearly three decades watching her characters’ lives intersect across her body of work. Her 10th book, the tender “Tell Me Everything,” has the feel of a long-awaited reunion: Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton, the Burgess siblings, William and Margaret and Helen and Pam — the gang’s all here.
“Tell Me Everything” finds Lucy, a writer who has recently relocated from New York City to Crosby, Maine, in a will-they-or-won’t-they plot with Bob Burgess, a mostly retired lawyer who has lived in Crosby for 15 years with his wife, Margaret. On riverside strolls together (which they began taking in Strout’s previous novel, “Lucy by the Sea”), Lucy and Bob develop an emotional intimacy that promises — or threatens — to become more. Meanwhile, Olive, now 90 and blunt as ever, summons Lucy to her retirement community to tell her a story about Olive’s mother, thinking that “if her story could be told to a writer, maybe it could be used in a book one day.”
Lucy ends up visiting Olive regularly so that the two women can trade stories about the “unrecorded lives” of people they’ve known. At the same time, Bob agrees to take on the defense of Matt Beach, a local man suspected of murdering his octogenarian mother.
A self-taught painter of pregnant nudes, Matt Beach makes for a memorable addition to this familiar cast. A classic Strout type — solitary, childlike and ill at ease in the world — he is at once reminiscent of Pete Barton (Lucy’s brother) and Zach Burgess (Bob’s nephew) and also wholly his own.
The murder mystery here isn’t much of one; perhaps by design, readers will solve it long before the characters do. But its resolution embodies Strout’s enduring preoccupation with a particular paradox of human nature: that each of us can be both deeply known and ultimately unknowable. In prior novels, Strout has written of Bob’s “ancient inner Bobness,” and Jim’s “Jimlike” nature; “you’re not strange, you’re Lucy,” Bob says in “Tell Me Everything.” And yet, as Lucy puts it, “People are mysteries. We all are such mysteries.”
Strout’s best work exhibits some of this same duality, her prose style at once familiar and beguilingly unpredictable. In “Tell Me Everything,” the former quality often outweighs the latter; the “Stroutness” of the writing can feel oddly emphatic. Her iconic “Oh” is here, there and everywhere: We get “Oh poor Pam!”; “Oh Jim Burgess! What are we to do with you?”; “Oh, the body weighs us down”; “Oh, this poor earth!” The novel is similarly rife with the blunt truisms that are a hallmark of the author’s oeuvre: “The point is that she had her story, as we all have our stories.” These devices feel overused and somewhat threadbare here; over time they have lost the power to evoke the strong feeling they did in earlier books.
Still, “Tell Me Everything” offers readers an abundance of the searing and plain-spoken insights for which Strout is beloved. “Those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us,” the narrator wisely observes. Lucy, on marriage: “Every so often a couple has a fight and things get said, and it scares them both profoundly, and yet in a heartbeat they pretend that fight never happened, because they can’t proceed with what they just learned.” Strout is a master at conjuring emotion with a simple palette, at bringing a reader to tears without feeling the least bit manipulated.
The tie that binds all of Strout’s characters is their shared yearning, not for a reprieve from their suffering but for just one person to really see it — for the solace and dignity of acknowledgment. Sometimes they get this. Sometimes they must build a life without it. But always, they are seen by Strout, whose novels might be best understood as acts of compassionate witness. Strout looks, she sees. And when we read her books — oh! — so do we.
The post Elizabeth Strout Gets the Gang Back Together for a Murder Mystery appeared first on New York Times.
