Olive Ketteridge, Elizabeth Strout

Olive Ketteridge is a beautiful, rich portrait of ordinary lives when they don't play out as we might have thought. It is full of people dealing with disappointments or the aftermath of small tragedies. A quiet sadness pervades the novel yet it's not depressing. I concentrates not on the disappointments or tragedies themselves but the resilience of people and the way in which they carry on with their lives. A lot of novels deal with happenings and then leave the characters to cope, but Strout addresses the coping and it is refreshingly human.

I think the book is trying to be a 'whole' novel, though it reads as if it were originally written as a collection of short stories. Olive Ketteridge is the main protagonist for most of the stories, though in some she is just mentioned in passing. It is more a portrait of lives circling around each other in a town than a portrait of Ketteridge. This expectation only comes from the title, it would feel very different if the expectation wasn't there, if there was a different title. I did like the short-story format, I'm a huge fan of the short story, but I thought this book didn't commit to either being a collection of stories or a flowing novel. Aside from that it is a full, well rounded portrait of lives and is well worth a read.