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A Novel
by Elizabeth Strout
Book Reviewed by:From Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a hopeful, healing novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.
With her "extraordinary capacity for radical empathy" (The Boston Globe), remarkable insight into the human condition, and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, "What does anyone's life mean?"
It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—"unrecorded lives," Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which we our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, "Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love."
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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.
* * *
Autumn comes early to Maine.
By the second or third week in August a person driving in a car might glance up and see in the distance the top of a tree that has become red. In Crosby, Maine, this year it happened first with the large maple tree by the church, and yet it was not even midway through the month of August. But the tree began to change color on its side facing east. This was curious to those who had lived there for years, they could not remember that being the first tree to change color. By the end of August, the entire tree was not red but a slightly orange yellowy thing, to be seen...
Those who've enjoyed this author's previous work will likely be delighted to see her main protagonists finally brought together in Crosby. Tell Me Everything can be read as a standalone novel; that said, those who haven't will almost certainly want to read the previous novels once they've encountered these marvelous characters. In typical Strout fashion, one can't necessarily say the novel has a firm narrative arc. While these varied plotlines sustain the forward momentum, they almost seem like an afterthought, a loose scaffolding on which to build something simultaneously simpler yet somehow grander...continued
Full Review
(674 words)
(Reviewed by Kim Kovacs).
In Elizabeth Strout's novel Tell Me Everything, the author discusses the concept of the modern-day "sin-eater." In her interpretation, the term applies to a person who helps others unburden themselves of their guilt or emotional pain, allowing them to move forward with their lives. In England, Scotland, and Wales, however, "sin-eater" was an actual profession. In the 18th and 19th centuries, impoverished people could be hired to eat the sins of the recently deceased.
There are several theories as to how the practice arose. Some point to the use of a scapegoat as outlined in the Bible (Leviticus 16:8-10), where a goat was burdened with the sins of the Jewish people and sent off into the wilderness during the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) ...
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