I cannot say I enjoyed this reading experience. The characters are wearisome, the dialogue is ponderous, and the plot is meandering. The best part for me was the ending. To think I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t persevered. Actually the beginning kind of hooked me too, but everything in between was just meh. Here is how the story grabbed my attention and drew me in.
“This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; 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.”
Full disclosure: Strout has written about this town and its inhabitants before. I’ve read and enjoyed some of their stories, and have felt not so much love for others.* Many of these characters make an appearance in Tell Me Everything, and therein lies a big part of the problem for me.
When these characters are introduced in this story, they don’t have enough depth to them. For instance, I hated the book, Oh William and couldn’t really remember the backstory between Lucy Barton and her ex-husband William, so the continuation of their relationship in this novel didn’t resonate with me. Apparently, Strout also wrote about Bob and his brother Jim in The Burgess Brothers which I haven’t read. That background knowledge would’ve been helpful, too.
On the other hand, I love the scene where Olive Kitteridge sits and observes everyone at Bob’s birthday party. Olive is the one character I appreciate, and I’m a huge fan of Strout’s other books that centered on her storyline. Added bonus: Imagine Francis McDormand in the television miniseries version bringing the curmudgeonly, down-home-Maine character to life!
The plodding, run-on-sentence style of writing also got on my last nerve. To me, it reflects the demeanor of the Lucy Barton character, who is supposedly a writer. Or maybe it’s just meant to capture the folksy familiarity of people from the Pine Tree State.
Whatever the reason, this stylist distraction ruined my enjoyment of even the intriguing plot points such as the concept of Bob Burgess being a “sin-eater” because of his compassion for others. Similarly, the relationship between Olive and Lucy when they tell each other stories about the “unrecorded lives” of people they had known, would have been more poignant without the clumsy wordage. Here is an example of the kind of superfluous description I find annoying.
Bob bumped into Katherine Caskey on the street. “Bob!” she said, and he said, “Hello, Katherine.” They continued walking till they reached Katherine’s car. Katherine unlocked the car and took the package from Bob and stuck it into the backseat, then turned to Bob.
Here is a little, obtuse statement that I can really sink my brain into.
“And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those who do love us.”
Here’s a little taste of why I relate so much to Olive.
Olive was silent for a long moment. Then she said, meditatively, “It’s quite a world we live in, isn’t it. For years I thought: I will miss all this when I die. But the way the world is these days, I sometimes think I’ll be damned glad to be dead.”
Everything good about this book (finally, sort of) comes together in the last two chapters. “Love is love” seems to be the message, but even this universal theme is diluted by Lucy’s simplistic words, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”
*This in itself is a strange occurrence for me. How can the same author inspire such polar opposite reactions from me with just a simple change of focus on the characters?
I had a similar experience with Fredrik Backman’s work. Loved: My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She’s Sorry and A Man Called Ove. Couldn’t get into: Anxious People or Bear Town. 🤷♀️
