Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

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Reviewed by Harriet

I discovered the wonderful Elizabeth Strout back in 2017, when I reviewed My Name is Lucy Barton for Shiny. Since then I’ve reviewed another four of her novels on here, most recently Lucy By the Sea (2022). Together with Oh William! of the previous year, these made up two volumes of a what could easily become a trilogy, so it’s not surprising to find Lucy here still living in Crosby, on the Maine coast, still with her ex-husband William. What’s more surprising, though nothing is really surprising in Strout’s tender, profound, delightful novels, is to find her making friends with the central character of two of Strout’s other books, Olive Kitteridge. In the final story of Olive Again (2019),  Olive had moved to a retirement community and befriended one of the central characters of Strout’s  first novel, Amy and Isabelle (1998).  Now, aged 90, she’s still living in Maple Tree Apartments, but her best friend Isabelle is getting very frail and may not last much longer. And Olive, with her lively, inquisitive, often combative mind, and her love for stories about people, feels rather lonely and isolated. So she contacts her friend Bob Burgess, and asks him to put her in touch with Lucy, all of whose books she has recently read: ‘something made her think that this Lucy might like – or possibly use – the story Olive had to tell’. 

If you’re already a reader of Strout, you will know that Bob Burgess and his brother Jim, both lawyers,  have had a novel all to themselves, The Burgess Boys (2013). In that novel the brothers were in their fifties, but time has passed and this is how the present novel begins:

This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.

This kind of intertwining is not unusual for Strout, though as she said in a recent interview ‘I never ever intend to keep writing about the same people, but it gradually came to me that they are all living nearby’.  Tell Me Everything does tell Bob’s story, though we have to wait till the second chapter for it to start. Married, not particularly happily, to his second wife Margaret, a Unitarian minister, Bob has made friends with Lucy and the two go on frequent walks together, sharing thoughts, feelings and observations that they don’t share with their partners. They are comfortable together. Lucy, meanwhile, continues her visits to Olive : she has quickly summed up the older woman, telling the surprised Bob that Olive is frightened:

‘Yes, frightened, Bob. She’s a bully, and bullies are always frightened. But I liked her, and she ended up liking me’.

You might think this sounds like a novel in which nothing much happens, but you’d be wrong. The stories that Olive tells Lucy often concern people and happenings in the immediate neighbourhood, including the events surrounding the recent murder of an unpleasant old woman and the conviction of her sensitive artist son, a case which Bob Burgess takes on as he believes the young man is innocent. Bob, meanwhile, is deeply worried about his unhappily married alcoholic ex-wife, about his brother Jim, whose wife is dying, and, increasingly, about his own feelings for Lucy, which, he comes to realise, are frighteningly deep. 

You might wonder from all this whether you need to have read all the other novels in order to appreciate this one. But you’d be quite wrong. This is a book about ordinary human beings who, as always in Strout’s novels, prove to be far more interesting and complex than you would ever guess if you passed them in the street. And there’s always some good to be found in her central characters, however difficult or mistaken they may sometimes be, once they come under Strout’s sympathetic, understanding gaze. Bob, whose honest sweetness and overwhelming desire to help others and to do the right thing become increasingly evident throughout the novel, is a pleasure to be with. Olive, indomitable, outspoken, but with such a lively interest in the world around her and capable of real love. And it’s as always so satisfying to be back once more with Lucy, whose ability to understand and not to judge, to appreciate people who others may dismiss, and above all to listen, make her the friend we would all like to have. Put all this together with Strout’s beautiful, spare prose and this is a novel which will please first time readers as well as those who are happy to be re-connecting with characters they have come to know and love. Lucy’s final words to Olive, at the end of the novel, could be said to sum up a belief that this novel, and all of Strout’s others, have at their heart:

‘Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love’.

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Harriet is one of the founders and a co-editor of Shiny.

Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything (Penguin, 2024). 978-0241634356, 310pp., hardback.

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