Liars and Saints

  Elizabeth Strout writes odd and compelling characters. Artie Dam--her new protagonist--is silently considering suicide. He teaches history at a high school, and his boss has said that local pro-Trump forces are demanding curricular revisions. Artie can no longer ask his students to play the roles of Northern soldiers in a Civil War reenactment. He must now offer a choice between a Northern *or* a Confederate role. Meanwhile, Artie has an angry protege whose talent involves Shakespeare studies. Artie's little protege causes a problem by insulting another student in class. Artie digs deeper. The insult grew from a personal wound; Artie's protege understands that his mother is having an affair, and he doesn't know what to do with his pain. Elsewhere, Artie's adult son Rob suspects that Artie's recent boating accident was not an accident. "You have to promise me you won't kill yourself," Rob says. "Because everything you do is like a map of the stuf...

  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 nur...

 Elizabeth Strout gets linked with Hemingway; both writers use the white space to say things that words can't say. Famously, Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants" looks at abortion from several angles--and yet the word "abortion" never appears in the text. In Strout's "Oh William," two people burdened by grief are on a trip together; although grief rarely gets named or addressed, it's lurking in every scene. Strout may win the Booker Prize within the next few weeks. Until her forties, she had never published a novel. Now, in her sixties, she publishes a new book every year. We're talking about five years in a row. "Oh William" has a narrator, Lucy Barton, whose husband has died. In mourning, Lucy hears from an *earlier* husband, William. William can be a chore; he wears his khakis too short, and he is palpably insecure about his job. Also, he has a slight mean streak; he finds exactly the right way to embarrass Lucy, then h...

It’s a little bit ridiculous the number of major-event books happening right now. A memoir by Saeed Jones, the fantasy novel “Ninth House,” a new “Golden Compass” novel, a new Edna O’Brien, some kind of non-fiction from Lindy West: These are all (all!) Mark Your Calendar books. I’ve more or less abandoned my efforts to stay current with trashy movies: “The Curse of La Llorona,” “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” “Abominable,” “Zombieland 2” are all just wishes I once had, now receding, receding, in my rearview mirror. But new books? They are something I can try to keep up with even while jiggling a small baby on my lap. Anyway, the book that will likely generate some of the loudest buzz is the book that arrives tomorrow: “Olive, Again,” by Elizabeth Strout, and here are the things worth knowing. *Strout is extremely fond of Russian writers, and she also likes Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, and Alice Munro. One surprise: She is a fan of Stewart O’Nan, who lives in Pittsburgh ...

One of my heroes is Elizabeth Strout, for a few reasons. *When Strout was struggling to launch her writing career, she became a stand-up comic. She did this although it was terrifying. And the reason: She felt there was something facile or glib in her fiction. She wanted to feel that she was telling the absolute truth--capturing life as it really is. And stand-up comics need to do this, if they're going to be successful. A Comedy Cellar audience won't tolerate bull-shit. This is how Strout trained. *It doesn't seem all that common to write "sequels" in the world of literary fiction, although Philip Roth did it. I admire Stout's weird career--how she returned to Lucy Barton after everyone thought she was finished with Lucy Barton. And it looks like we'll be getting a sequel to "Olive Kitteridge" next year. *Another contrarian streak: It's not all that common to write a "novel in stories." But why not? I love the way that Olive ...