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Elizabeth Strout: "Tell Me Everything"

 Elizabeth Strout's new novel is overstuffed and maybe structurally unsound, but it's still powerful.


It's about a collection of troubled people. One, Pam, is an alcoholic who hides her habit by drinking in the old "servant's cubby" in a Manhattan apartment. One day, she is cowering there, with her vodka bottle, when her husband wanders into the adjoining bedroom. He has brought his secret girlfriend--and a blow job ensues. Pam listens in horror; she almost drops her bottle.

Elsewhere, a man privately dislikes his wife, an Episcopalian minister, because she is just slightly narcissistic. When the wife gets negative feedback from a church elder, her work changes, but also (oddly) her marriage changes.

A third story concerns a woman (Isabelle) who has an opportunity to leave her nursing home. Her ambivalent daughter has offered up a plane ticket: Isabelle can fly across the country and live in an actual house, in California. But Isabelle has a friend in the nursing home--and this late-blooming friendship makes the "memory care unit" tolerable. Which housing situation is more appealing? This is an unusual kind of love triangle, and I have a feeling it describes a scenario that actual Americans find themselves in, on a regular basis (a scenario that fiction tends to ignore).

Strout does her own thing. She tells stories that others overlook. Also, if "the novel" is dying, then Strout has not heard, or has opted not to care. Bless her for that.
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