This novel features one of the most obnoxious women I’ve encountered in contemporary fiction. Olive Kitteridge is a blunt, rude, argumentative and insensitive retired maths teacher in a small coastal town of Crosby, Maine. She’s the kind of person you’d want to cross the street to avoid if you saw her out and about. afraid that you’d be on the receiving end of her barbed comments.
This woman doesn’t have a sensitivity filter at all. She just comes right out with whatever she thinks, oblivious to the effect her words have on those around her. Towards her neighbours she can be brutally frank and unkind but she also shows little warmth towards her own family members.
Right from the start we discover that Olive Kitteridge is quick to judge other people based on next to no evidence. When her placid, kindly husband Henry comes home one day with news that he’s hired a sweet young girl to assist him in the pharmacy, Olive’s response is typically dismissive:
‘Mousy,’ his wife said, when he hired the new girl. ‘Looks just like a mouse.’
Denise Thibodeau had round cheeks, and small eyes that peeped through her brown-framed glasses. ‘But a nice mouse,’ Henry said. ‘A cute one.’
No one’s cute who can’t stand up straight,’ Olive said.
That exchange sums up Olive’s negative attitude to just about everyone she encounters. Her husband has tolerated her for years but she’s alienated her child Christopher with her dictatorial attitude.
In her eyes the inhabitants of the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine are all “stupid” (one of her favourite words). Olive however can do no wrong. Henry once said to her, “I don’t believe you’ve ever once apologised. For anything.” and in fact we never do see Olive admit to being wrong. Not even when she has an almighty bust up while visiting Christopher and his wife in New York. Though she knows deep down that over-reacted, instead of apologising she just stomps off to the airport in a fury.
In the course of these linked short stories we discover a lot about Olive through the lenses of neighbours, friends, former pupils and her family, And the more we come to know about her, the more apparent it becomes that Olive’s abrasive external persona hides a sensitive personality. She’s deeply hurt when she hears negative comments about her appearance and affronted that anyone should think she is getting old. I wonder whether it’s her pride that prevents her showing how much she’s wounded or is it fear that she will soon be viewed as an irrelevance?
That row with Christopher does mark a watershed in Olive’s attitude to life. It helps her to reach a deeper understanding of what’s important and to see the world around her in a more positive light.
And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats–then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water–seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed.
The Olive we see by the end of the book is a calmer, more settled individual who seems to be embarking on a new phase in her life. The question of course is whether this change in her personality is sustained — readers will have to wait until a later book, Olive Again, to get the answer. Part of me is hoping that the irascible Olive hasn’t completely disappeared because she such a magnificent creation.
We're all friends here. Come and join the conversation