Friendships, of the quiet and cosy kind, are scattered across the pages of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, Tell Me Everything, for you to pick up and fuss about, it would seem. Aww, you would say, there is Lucy Barton and oh, old Olive Kitteridge, and most of all, dear Bob Burgess – adored characters from Strout’s earlier works. It is almost a friendship triangle between these three aging figures in Maine, New England, but they are not left to be alone, other kindred souls come along and are warmly taken into their fold.
Strout does with her newest what she always does, make the mundane adorable, the ordinary matter, the conversations of people who are fond of each other too precious. Lucy and Olive, who begin a friendship by telling each other stories of people they knew, spell it out for you. After one of their stories, Lucy asks Olive what is the point of this story, to which Olive laughs and says she doesn’t know, just like she did not know what the point of any of Lucy’s stories was. Lucy then says, “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.” And Olive says, “Exactly.”
You have by then got it yourself, for that is also the point of Strout’s whole book. Unrecorded lives, Olive calls it. But Lucy and Olive, we have been told much earlier in the story, are not the protagonists of this book. It is Bob with the big heart. I wouldn’t quite agree, even if Lucy and another dear character called Matt repeatedly say ‘Bob, you are Bob’ (meaning his bad haircut did not make him a different person), Bob really wouldn’t be Bob without the people in his life.
Bob is 65, a criminal lawyer who appears incapable of hurting a fly but has – as humans do – his bad moments. He lives with his second wife, Margaret, a church minister, is still in touch with his former wife Pam, and like we said, takes friendly walks with Lucy. When things happen for Bob, you wait for him to come and tell it to Lucy, because you know only she gets it the way he means them – not Margaret or Pam, who live with it for a moment and then let it go. Strout’s strong point is this – the way she can let the emotion of the slightest moment sink deep. At the end of every one of their walks, Bob lights a cigarette – which he doesn’t in Margaret’s presence – moves around to let the wind blow the smell away while Lucy talks to him sitting on a bench. Every time he then thanks Lucy – the thanks is for the smoke she doesn’t mind – and she says of course. The repetitions of this gesture do not tire you, they only take you deeper into their world.
As Lucy vehemently maintains it is friendship they share, the signs keep thrusting themselves harder and harder – the faces lighting up at the mere sight of each other, the missing, the misery of not wanting to deal with it. Love is love, Lucy declares at one point, meaning whatever way you love another, you are still loving them.
Bob is more acknowledging of his feelings, but it does not keep him away from offering himself to others, feeling their pain and their love, proving Lucy’s theory that ‘if it is love, then it is love’. He comes to the aid of Matt Beach, whose mother had been murdered, and who becomes a suspect that people of the town call unblameable. No one liked the mother. As soon as you meet Matt, you get another stereotype of a tender man found in Strout books. How are they so unpretentious, so adorably tactless, and yet so likeable?
Just like Bob has Matt, Lucy’s got Charlene Bibber, a lonely widow who cleaned houses. Olive’s got her Isabelle, to whose place she would walk to with her stories everyday. You have to remember, these folks are happily elderly – Lucy and Bob in their 60s, Olive a grand 90. Their friends too are in the neighbourhood of their ages, not that it matters, except that it allows an enviable bounty of experiences to fall all over the pages.
Bob, weighed down by his indefinable feelings for Lucy and the Matt case, also takes on the role of saviour to his brother Jim, who is losing his wife and is despised by his son. If you had an issue with Strout replicating her characters – Bob and Lucy and Matt are all coated with streaks of gentleness – you will be happy that Jim is neither here nor there. Admittedly, Jim can’t seem to escape the ‘niceness’ that appears to envelop everyone who comes by. Even Susan, Bob’s twin, has an innocence that makes it hard for her to fathom that someone may want to have dinner with her.
Luckily there is Olive, who with all her wisdom can be grumpy, even if you like that grumpiness. And also Lucy’s ex-husband William, a distracted figure, talking about himself.
As if the adorability of the characters and their ways are not enough, they are given endearments – poor Pam, poor poor Matt, oh Bob, oh Lucy. One of the Lucy books, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was titled Oh William! So there.
In that way, you have to forget the real world for long bits, or else allow yourself to be comforted by the innocence of the Strout world. Tragedies happen here, even murder. But not even the murderer is allowed to be hateful. They have stories, lives lived before they became murderers. In other words, you are simply not allowed to hate. You’d wish a good part of the real world, drenched in the miseries of war even as we speak, would fall into this place and come out as people who love other people and live their lives.