OLIVE, AGAIN - Elizabeth Strout"s Reprisal on Olive

Elizabeth Strout (b Amer. 1956) is a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist.  Her 2nd novel "Olive Kitteridge" received the Pulitzer for Fiction ('09) and was made into an Emmy winning mini-series starring Bill Murray and Frances McDormand.  Strout's innovative style morphs short stories into a novel intertwining characters with our unique central figure, Olive Kitteridge.  Then as in now, Kitteridge and the sharply drawn people in the novel are all intriguing; even more so for the interactions and spin Olive puts on these quirky people residing in Crystal Falls, ME.  The reprisal of past characters from previous novels are delightfully brought back to life.  Most beguiling, off-putting and endearing is the gristly Olive.  Olive is a modern day anti-heroine.  She is irksome, lovable, cantankerous, compassionate, opinionated and someone we want to spend time getting to know although "She's not everyone's cup of tea."  You can't help but wonder how Olive might regard us, if at all.  Thankfully, Strout brings revives Olive as she's aged although still obdurate, she's become more sagacious.  Olive is more outgoing and reflects back on her life.  She concedes regrets and is  more open-minded with a willingness to make accommodations for others.  We catch-up with Olive a decade later; after her husband Henry has passed and her estranged son Chris is now a father of four.  This time Olive is shaken, but not stirred away from broaching others and mending fences.  Jack returns in this novel as an important companion in Olive's life.  Jack serves as her sounding board, voice of reason & catalysis to experience new things.  Jack enables Oliver to consider matters from different points of view.  This exquisitely written novel about an obstreperous, older woman is moreover a lugubrious lament on loneliness.  "It should never be taken lightly, the essential loneliness of people, that the choices they made to keep themselves from that gaping darkness were choices that required respect."  Interspersed within the melancholic motif of loneliness are highlighted moments of elegance and utter beauty.  Olive is observant & elegiac about the world around her.  "There was a kind of horrifying beauty to the world:  The oak trees held their leaves, gold & shriveled...everything sort of ghastly and absolutely gorgeous with the sunlight that fell at an angle, never reaching the top of the sky."  OLIVE, AGAIN delights us once again.