Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge novels, is a rare thing: critically acclaimed and hugely successful commercially. In this, her 11th publication, Maine is left behind for a (so far) standalone novel focused on Artie Dam, a history teacher in Massachusetts Bay.
Strout has won a legion of admirers by creating a literary voice that is uniquely her own, but that draws upon timeless storytelling traditions. In essence, to read Strout is to experience an intimate conversation with a gripping storyteller who helps you to see the world anew. This great strength, a very powerful authorial voice, does however, begin to suggest a diminishing return here.
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Most of the novel is told from Artie’s perspective, but occasionally Strout slips into omniscience, and sporadically offers some context for the reader in brackets. These authorial intrusions disrupt the narrative flow, irrespective of what good company Strout is. Even for a devotee, of which I am one, it jars.
Nevertheless, as fans of Strout will have come to expect, Artie is an ordinary man that contains multitudes. A man with a secret, whose life is capsized when he learns he is not the only one. Artie is amazed to discover that all people “held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe”. This is not a revelation for Strout, however, but rather the narrative thread that connects all her novels – she delights in spotlighting the beauty she observes in what others deem banal. The poor and the elderly, so often maligned or sidelined in literature, take centre-stage. Loneliness and shame are her specialist subjects.
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There is even an intertextual cameo for Olive Kitteridge here when Artie recalls learning from that novel that “people die of loneliness. It happens all the time”. In an era where the World Health Organisation has declared loneliness to be a global public threat, Strout has tapped into something very alive in the human psyche. And offered a salve. The only folks held in judgment in Strout’s world are those with a “poverty of spirit”.
As Strout is concerned with the personal plights of ordinary people, her novels are inevitably political. That withstanding, this work is the most overtly political so far, set as it is in advance of the 2024 US presidential election. When the results came through, Artie believed that “his country was committing suicide”. This more explicit reckoning with the political landscape feels essential to avoid a sense of Strout pulling her punches.
If readers are unfamiliar with Strout, this is not the novel of hers to begin with. But for those already enamoured of her subtly profound prose, this should prove a welcome return from a familiar voice, one with a new story to tell.
Helen Cullen is the author of The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually and the forthcoming Iseult
