Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
A sparkling and masterfully crafted novel that indulges our innate curiosity in humanity, grief, happiness and what it means to love.
Tell Me Everything is the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout. Going into this novel knowing beloved Strout characters Bob Burgess, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge would have a part to play, I wondered if we’d spend equal time with each of them in this story.
Or maybe that’s what I was hoping for. (Since I can’t pick a favourite between them.) And while we do delve into the lives of each of them, this story belongs to Bob Burgess.
As always, Strout explores the vulnerabilities and mysteries of the human condition — without sentimentality and without cliches. She shows us that love comes in many forms and is always subject to change and who knows what or who decides whether it regresses or blossoms into something new. She shows that we don’t know even our closest loved ones as well as we might think, that there are unknown multitudes to every person and that the self is as expansive as the universe.
A Book that Belongs to Bob Burgess
In Strout’s new novel, lawyer Bob is traversing a difficult time in life, navigating his sometimes fraught relationships with his wife Margaret, his very close friend Lucy, his brother Jim and his wife Helen, and a new person he meets, Matt.
Matt is a reclusive and introverted person with behaviours and interests that others find strange and even suspicious. When he is accused of murdering his own mother, Bob takes the case. Given that Bob believes he was responsible for the accidental death of his father, this case feels especially personal to him and it unfolds in expected and complicated ways.
As well as the intense pressure and anxiety of the case, Bob faces other hardships in his family life and his romantic life. The stress he endures brings out a more authoritative and sometimes angry side to Bob, a side we haven’t seen much before in the previous books he features in. Surprisingly, this change is a welcome one because — as kind, empathetic and often selfless as Bob is — it’s satisfying to see him standing up for himself, the people he cares about and what’s right.
An Unlikely Friendship
Also in this book, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge meet for the first time. The initial introduction feels like a movie cross-over, the best kind.
At first, Olive is somewhat miffed by Lucy, her sensibilities, ‘mousiness’ and open vulnerability. Olive is a stoic Mainer with a frustrating and sometimes cold disposition with her cutting comments and cynical outlook on life. But she is full of love too — it’s just that people have to earn it. But the two women eventually strike up a friendship, sharing stories of what they call ‘unrecorded lives’ and questioning the purpose of these soon-to-be-forgotten stories.
Without getting too existential or philosophical, Strout expertly crafts these deep conversations and they’re a joy to read. It’s like the reader is sitting right there in Olive’s room in the retirement home, listening and being enthralled by gossip and touched by tragedies.
I’ve always thought of Strout’s work as being a bit of a study in anthropology. She’s deeply concerned with how people connect and interact, why they behave in certain ways, why they are the way they are. And that’s one of the many things that makes her stories so gripping, even when they’re focused on the so-called mundane of ordinary life. Strout doesn’t need high drama or a twisting-and-turning plot littered with bombshells to hold attention until the final page.
Strout’s Literary Universe and Signature Voice
This is Strout’s 10th novel and, across her books, she has created a literary universe with characters who appear and reappear, meet and connect with each other and change throughout the decades. For readers already familiar with her work, Tell Me Everything will feel like coming back to your hometown to catch up with old friends. But for those new to her work, Strout regularly orientates the reader with snippets of background on what each character has gone through in the time before we meet them — meaning you don’t have to have read all her previous novels to enjoy this one.
As well as providing occasional exposition to give the reader context of the personal history and interior lives of these characters, Strout also writes with a charming, conversational and vivid narrative voice. The third-person narrator regularly says things like “as we previously said” which makes the reader feel even more like we’re sitting down with a familiar friend or relative who’s telling us a story. Particularly in this book, the narrator feels like another character we grow fond of who speaks in poetry without pretension.
Strout never shies away from dark topics and tragedy — and this book is no exception. She also encourages the reader to interrogate their own view on the concept of legacy, why we’re here and what we will leave behind. But like her other novels, Tell Me Everything is filled with heart, humanity, humour and, above all, realness.
Tell Me Everything is a sparkling and masterfully crafted novel that indulges our innate curiosity in humanity, grief, happiness and what it means to love.
Elizabeth Strout is the author of the New York Times bestseller Olive Kitteridge, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize; the national bestseller Abide with Me; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in London. She lives in Maine and New York City.
Publish Date: 9/10/2024
Genre: Fiction
Author: Elizabeth Strout
Page Count: 352 pages
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9780593446096