Olive meets Lucy

It took two decades of film-making to get Al Pacino and Robert De Niro into the same frame. The actors came close in 1974 with The Godfather: Part II (De Niro played Pacino’s father in flashbacks) but they did not share the screen until until Heat (1995), Michael Mann’s sleek heist thriller, with Pacino the cop and De Niro the robber. The result was magnificently – pyrotechnically – quiet. The two men sat across from one another in a late-night diner; spoke of life and how to live it; stared each other down.

Heat inevitably came to mind when I was reading Elizabeth Strout’s latest volume of fine-spun, small-town storytelling. For, after sixteen years and eight volumes of fiction, the author’s indelible heroines – Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton – have finally made it on to the same page.

It is hard to think of two more richly drawn characters in contemporary fiction. Olive appeared first (in Olive Kitteridge, 2008), where we found her as a former teacher and eternal tyrant; ornery and bull-headed – shielding a bruised heart. Lucy followed in 2016 (in My Name Is Lucy Barton), emerging as an accomplished but diffident novelist, marked by childhood poverty; a gentle woman of gentle wants.

Strout had no literary masterplan. “I never ever intend to keep writing about the same people”, she explained in a recent interview with the Guardian (Sept 7, 2024). But Olive and Lucy have narrative gravity. They have not only persevered but, book by book, pulled each other into a single orbit.

It was Strout’s previous novel, Lucy By the Sea (2022), that manoeuvred Olive and Lucy into the same small town on the windswept coast of Maine – a pandemic sea change for Lucy. In Strout’s new book, Tell Me Everything, the two women are introduced by a mutual friend. Olive thinks Lucy is a “meek-and-mousy looking thing”; Lucy thinks Olive is a bully. But Olive has stories to tell and Lucy is a storyteller. The two women also recognize a kindred loneliness in one another, a ferocious, and unmet, desire to be known. The scenes they share feel as quietly pyrotechnic – and existentially violent – as the one in Pacino and De Niro’s diner. All of life and death is here.

But away from Olive and Lucy’s conversations, Tell Me Everything is a jostling, jarring mess. This is the most intensely plotted of Strout’s fictions: there are births, deaths and marriages, family estrangements and monstrous confessions, a handful of small-town scandals and lashings of unrequited love. There is even a grizzly murder to solve. Strout’s focus is on the friend who brings Olive and Lucy together, a “sin-eating” lawyer called Bob Burgess. “Like many of us he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”

This is Strout’s perennial point: every life is a story (“All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them”, Lucy marvels). But something about Strout’s project has curdled in the last two books. What used to feel revelatory and humane now feels insistently – almost patronizingly – sentimental: all these New England boomers squelching around in their own upper-middle-class agonies, lamenting a “world gone crazy” from the comfort of their beach houses. And there is a gossipy quality about Tell Me Everything that makes the reader feel complicit, not honouring the forlorn lives of others but revelling in them.

Strout has said that “no matter what happens, Olive Kitteridge will never die on my watch”. Perhaps it is time to leave her and Lucy Barton to their conversation. What a joy it is to imagine them forever in each other’s company: talking about life and how to live it; staring each other down.

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic

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