Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

I received Olive Kitteridge as a Christmas present after watching the Sky Atlantic mini-series last year. I’ve always been an advocate for the book that comes before any screen adaptation and I always will be. I think even Olive Kitteridge would criticise my roundabout way of initially encountering her story. 

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout is a telling of the lives of characters that inhabit a coastal town in Maine. Each of the thirteen chapters exists as separate short stories, and can be considered all together as one form, or individually within their own contained shell. 

If the plot was to centre on a main character, it would be the title name. 

Olive Kitteridge is retired Maths teacher who lives with her quiet-mannered husband Henry and her angst-ridden son.

You may met Olive first-hand through Elizabeth Strout painfully beautifully verse or you have seen the Sky Atlantic television adaptation. Either way you must agree Mrs Kitteridge is one of fiction’s complex entities. 

Hardened, bitter, set in her ways and snappy, Olive is the ignored relative and feared schoolteacher. “I don’t know how he can stand her” comments Bob Houlton in the Winter Concert chapter, after Henry Kitteridge and his wife arrive at Church.

Despite that I couldn’t help warming to Mrs Kitteridge and her firm way of thinking. At times she shows a tender loving side which is out of sight from the prattles of town gossip and I felt protective over her and angry about any criticisms she endures.

What Elizabeth Strout has created is an interesting set of townspeople, each with their own sorrows and idiosyncrasies. Alongside any chapter where Olive Kitteridge appears my favourites also include The Piano Player which tells the life of an alcoholic lounge singer, and Ship in a Bottle, the story of a jilted teenage bride.