This week, a new novel, Erri De Luca’s 1999 book Three Horses, translated from Italian to English by Michael Moore in 2005. I first read Three Horses ten years ago. I do not recall what led me to the book; no doubt, it was either because of reading some reference to it or perhaps just seeing the cover in a brick and mortar bookshop. The cover of the 2005 paperback edition shows an evocative image of a color photograph that has been changed in a painterly way by an overlay of diagonal scratches suggesting rain. It’s a wonderful symbol of a story that is overtly realist but on a deeper level, finely crafted and changed by creativity. I was immediately entranced with the characters and story, and with De Luca’s wonderful style which we will be getting into, I promise you. The story, which is very timely, is that the narrator, who’s never named, is a survivor of the revolt against the Argentine junta of the 1970s and 80s. He has escaped to 1980s Italy where he works as a gardener. He meets a younger woman, Laila, and there’s an immediate attraction between them. She’s a prostitute who is , apparently, involved with a man who has some connection from Argentina with the narrator and menaces him. A refugee from Africa who works for the narrator kills this man to protect the narrator. The title, Three Horses, is taken from an Italian nursery rhyme: In three years a hedge, three hedges a dog, three dogs a horse, three horses a man. A man’s life lasts as long as that of three horses, twenty-seven times three. In the story, the protagonist’s first life has been extinguished in Argentina, so he’s on his second. By the end of the story, the narrator’s second life will have been ended too, his third is undescribed in this book. A Foreword section concerns the revolt in Argentina and concludes with the statement: “The immensity of places and events is connected to the accidents that befell people in this story.” Who is speaking here, and why are the elements of the plot described as accidents? More on this later. Then there is an epigram: “Woe to those who do not practice their purity ferociously,” attributed to Mario Trejo - Argentina 1926. Again, let’s return to this epigram at a later point to see how it fits. ‘Kay. Erri De Luca has been quoted as saying he can only write about things he’s experienced, and that is why his fiction is always written in first person. He embodies the philosophy of "write what you know." Interesting. I don’t think De Luca is claiming that he experienced literally everything in Three Horses, for instance, he was not in Argentine during the desperate time of the junta. However, he was very active politically in Italy during a time of out-and out rebellion against the government. Older readers may recall the Red Brigades and some high-profile assassinations. In the book, De Luca describes a political assassination from the assassin’s point-of-view, as well as the feelings a killer has. However, I don’t want to speculate as to whether or not De Luca was an assassin. My sense is that he’s saying he’s had certain experiences, like being part of a political rebellion, like falling intensely in love with a woman, which appear in his writing—not as himself exactly, as the protagonist of Three Horses is not named Erri. However, this situation does muddy the waters a bit. This blog often focuses on the three entities who create a work of fiction—the narrator, the implied author/style, and the real flesh-and-blood author. (whiny voice—not this again!) If we apply this tool to Three Horses, we get the unnamed narrator; we get a highly literary style, and we get an author who actively tries to model the narrator on himself, so much so that the lines of demarcation become blurred. Blurred, but a heavy hand puts this plot and these characters through a strong style which shapes it and them. It is the hand of the implied author, my friends. Here is how the implied author shows the narrator’s first encounter with Laila, the woman whom he falls in love with: (He’s sitting in a bar, reading.) “…I tear my head away from the white of the paper and the tablecloth and follow the line formed by the upper edge of the wall tiles in its tour around the room, passing behind the two black pupils of a woman, which sits on the vector like two notes split apart by the lower line of the pentagram. They’re staring straight at me.” Huh, beautiful writing, but unusual, no? Maybe not if the protagonist were a mathematician, but he isn’t. This guy is sitting in a bar, and a beautiful woman is staring at him. Someone in this situation might experience a range of reactions—intense curiosity, self-consciousness (have I spilled soup on myself?). Lust. But the narrator only describes the situation in a somewhat distant fashion, and says nothing about his own reaction. My point is that this important plot point is presented in a very stylized way. I actually find what’s described in this passage a little hard to imagine happening, which is another way to say that its mimetic function is less strong than its style. ‘Kay. Enough for now. Till next week. #ThreeHorses #ErriDeLuca

The Sea is the story of a troubled man who, after great personal tragedy, returns obsessively to the site of an earlier tragedy and re-experiences it without exhibiting much relief. I don’t think this character changes much; it is more that the reader is invited to make an increasingly large emotional investment as he reveals himself. So, how is this story told? Last week, I suggested that the protagonist, Max, relies on The Sea’s literary style to tell the story, perhaps to tell more than he himself is able to. Literary style can be defined as how a writer decides to express whatever he wants to say; his choice of words, the sentence structure, syntax, language (figurative or metaphorical). It is the way a writer writes, and it is the implied author who polishes and edits this prose, creating the style. “Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written.” ‘Kay. So the implied author creates a story’s style, and in The Sea, Max relies on the style to tell the story. He leans on the implied author, more than many characters do. In The Old Illusion of Belonging, Distinctive Style, Bad Faith, and John Banville’s The Sea, Monica Faccinello of the University of York, writes about how Max hides behind the style of the book, because without it, he fears he is nothing. As I wrote last week, Max feels he has no home, no career; he has no authenticity as a husband and a father. Faccinello discusses Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “bad faith,” citing Max as a prime example. Bad faith, Sartre says, is a lie to oneself, the attempt at “hiding a displeasing truth or to show as truth a pleasing untruth”, made possible, Sartre explains, by the fact that we are not “in-ourselves” what we are “for-ourselves.” The French philosopher offers the example of the waiter in a café, a man who makes “the typical gestures” of the waiter in order to be one. But in having to play the role, to represent himself as a waiter, Sartre argues, this man confirms that he is not a waiter. I believe this is a rather harsh way to look at behavior that is fairly common. When people begin a new job, a new role, it’s normal to experience a sense of “pretending” to be what one has not yet become. In-authentic. Growing into something. But in Max, the author is showing someone who takes a degree program in pretending, and never graduates. “Yet I know that I exist, that I am here…Now when I say “I,” it seems hollow to me. I can’t manage to feel myself very well, I am so forgotten. The only real thing left in me is existence which feels it exists. I yawn, lengthily. No one. Antoine Roquentin exists for no one. That amuses me. And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin…and suddenly the “I” pales, pales, and fades out.” (J.P. Sartre Nausea). Ow, a painful way to live, and Max is in pain. (which, actually, bestows authenticity). Now, it would seem that the whining gentleman is not with us this week, but if he were, he might object that Max is not real. He is a character in a novel, a creation of an author who remains behind the scenes. In The Sea, there is an illusion that the story represents Max writing a sort of diary or journal, in which he “confesses” shameful deeds and thoughts. Because of the poetic prose and frequent allusion to other great writers, the reader who is seduced by this illusion gets the sense that Max himself must be extraordinarily sensitive and literate, whereas actually it is the implied author (with Mr. Banville’s guidance) who is so. There is an illusion that Max Morden is at least a fine writer, if not also a basically good person wracked by grief and guilt. Max the character is not likable, but the reader (I think) grows to feel sorry for him, to excuse his behavior. Illusion because the story’s prose is not Max’s; it’s how the implied author “packages” the story. “Max” isn’t writing anything. And this is, I believe, Ms. Faccinello’s point, that Max tries to claim the authenticity he does not feel he has by hiding behind the story’s style. The idea here is that a shady character can hide behind gorgeous prose and the legitimacy that’s gained by reference to other great works. However, if the reader pries beneath the beautiful style, she/he finds a hollow man. Of course Max Morden (Modern) is not “real;” he’s a character in a novel, and his situation is meant to show something—perhaps that certain people experience themselves as inauthentic, and that this is tragic. And that this self-experience of inauthenticity could have its origins in particular experiences in the past. I think it is taking it too concretely to say that the point of The Sea is that to erect an identity through style is to indulge in bad faith. Who’s being accused of bad faith here? Max? John Banville? This is rabbit hole stuff, best beloved. Things become murky pretty fast. Is it that the story itself is pretending to be a novel? Is John Banville—who is a masterful author—pretending to be one? I do not know, my friend. I do not know. But I love this book. Next week, a new story: Erri de Luca’s Three Horses. Till then. #TheSea #JohnBanville

The drowning of Chloe and Myles Grace, is alluded to mysteriously in The Sea’s first line: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.” Here, Chloe and Myles are referred to as gods, and their deaths described as a departure. The actual event, shown close to the end, is in many ways the climax of the book. Let’s look at it more closely. At a deeper level of theme, the gods depart to death in the sea after one of them, Chloe Grace, has a sexual experience. This echoes ancient Greek myth where maidens die after experiencing sex. A move from childhood innocence to adulthood, with death as a transition. I’m thinking here of several mythic stories, the one about Persephone is a good example. A young girl, a child, is at play when she is spotted by Hades, the god of the underworld. He desires her and carries her off—permanently—to his realm. In The Sea, after an incident of sexual contact involving Chloe, Max, and Chloe’s brother Myles, (yikes!) where Chloe is shown having an orgasm, the young people are discovered by Rose (who is Miss Vavasour) and Chloe runs off toward the sea, Myles following. “Then calmly they stood up and waded into the sea, the water smooth as oil hardly breaking around them, and leaned forward in unison and swam out slowly, their two heads bobbing on the whitish swell, out, and out. We watched them, Rose and I…I do not know what I was thinking, I do not remember thinking anything…They were far out now, the two of them, so far as to be pale dots between pale sky and paler sea, and then one of the dots disappeared…A splash, a little white water, whiter than all that around, then nothing, an indifferent world closing. “Rose cried out, a sort of sob, and shook her head rapidly from side to side.” Max begins running along the beach, headed to tell Chloe’s parents what’s occurred. “I was running, trying to run, along the beach…Often in my dreams I am back there again, wading through that sand that grows ever more resistant, so that it seems that my feet themselves are made of some massy, crumbling stuff. What did I feel? Most strongly, I think, a sense of awe, awe of myself, that is, who had known two living creatures that were suddenly, astoundingly, dead.” Well. Here we are presented with an account of a drowning/possible suicide where the witnesses—Max and Rose make no effort to intervene. The adult Max writes: “I would like to ask her (Rose) if she blames herself for Chloe’s death.” But he does not and never questions his own responsibility—either for the sexual act or for passively watching the drownings. Does he blame himself? In many ways, this is the primary act of cowardice and betrayal that Max commits, the act he cannot forgive himself for. Then the line: “Was’t well done?” What does this Shakespearean quote signify? In Act 5 of The Tempest, it is Prospero’s sprite Ariel who says this to Prospero after she, at his bidding, brings the mariners to him, which leads to the end of the play. It was Ariel, I believe, who created the tempest, the storm that gives the play its name. (Wait—could there be other connections between The Sea and The Tempest? Both focus on the boundary between sea and shore, both involve a protagonist who has a daughter. Whoa! I think we should let the academics tackle this one). (whiny voice—isn’t sprite a soft drink? How come Prospero’s soft drink can talk?) But the implication here is that some other-worldly creature has somehow arranged the drowning of Chloe and Myles along with Max and Rose’s reactions, and is presenting the memory to the adult Max. It comes off as a sort of cruel joke, suggesting that these tragic events were a sort of theater. Or perhaps that the book’s recounting of them is a well-done and self-conscious piece of theater. Either way, it seems remarkably cold and empty. Perhaps that’s how Max feels. After this, a paragraph break, and the adult Max addresses Anna, his dead wife, as “you.” “Why have you not come back to haunt me?…Send back your ghost. Torment me, if you like. Rattle your chains, drag your cerements across the floor, keen like a banshee, anything. I would have a ghost.” So, Max seems to believe he is deserving of being haunted by his wife’s ghost, deserving because of self-judged crimes. Perhaps the implication is that Max hungers for authenticity through condemnation, but never gets it. It’s almost as if he’s pre-judged himself as lacking, that the narratee’s judgement is already assumed to be given. At the end, Max passively accepts his daughter taking over his life. He’s to return to Dublin, stop drinking, in general behave himself. His freedom is at an end, as is almost his life. “Nor did she stop there, but, flushed with that initial triumph, and seizing the advantage offered by my temporary infirmity, went on to direct, a figurative hand cocked on her hip, that I must pack up and leave the Cedars forthwith and let her take me home—home, she says!—where she will care for me, which care will include, I am given to understand, the withholding of all alcoholic stimulants, or soporifics, until such time as the Doctor, him again, declares me fit for something or other, life, I suppose. What am I to do? How am I to resist? She says it is time I got seriously down to work…I suppose I shall not be allowed to sell the house, either.” The book concludes with his final admission that he was not at his wife’s bedside when she died but had gone outside the hospice for a moment of fresh air. There’s a beautiful connection with the sea, and then a nurse summons Max back inside the hospital. Max, I think it’s fair to say, experiences himself as inauthentic, as not a real person. He feels he has no home, no career. He lacks authenticity as a husband and father. He lives more in the past than the present. And he relies on The Sea’s literary style to tell his story—more on this next week. Till then. #TheSea #JohnBanville

A central question (not the only one) in The Sea is to whom is the narrator, Max, addressing his narration? Max’s narrative has the feel of a diary, a private, often unedited document meant solely for the author’s use. However, given this definition, trouble lies ahead. Oh, no! The Sea is but a facsimile of a private document—facsimile because it is not a private document at all, it is a public work of fiction. Also, although we have every reason to accept that Max would narrate a story in a very sophisticated and polished manner—after all, he is a sort of academic and highly educated—this text is highly, highly refined, this prose has been polished, best beloved. And who is responsible, who is the polisher? Max, you say? Mr. Banville? If you say this, I am saddened. Saddened because we have spent much blood and treasure going over and over the distinctions and the relationships between the implied author, the real author, and the narrator of a text. Wait—maybe you haven’t read every post in this blog the way I have. I shouldn’t be saddened, but happy that you’re interested. (Pollyanna reference). ‘Kay. It is the implied author who has polished and edited this prose. “Distinct from the author and the narrator, the term refers to the "authorial character" that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written.” But I digress. To whom is the narration addressed? Max is not, in my opinion, telling a story in the way that Mr. Stevens, the narrator of The Remains of the Day, seems to be telling the story to an imaginary peer, a “you” whom he believes will understand him. Yet, is it possible that The Sea is written as a kind of plea for understanding, forgiveness, even? Max describes letting his wife and his daughter down, perhaps even letting Chloe Grace down long ago. He is guilt- ridden over his adult insensitivity. Perhaps it’s not a stretch to say The Sea may be addressed to an imaginary self whom Max believes is capable of offering grace and forgiveness. Whoa. Grace is the family name of very prominent characters in The Sea. We may be onto something here, my friends. So, under Mr. Banville’s supervision, the implied author of The Sea presents a story about Max, the narrator, who presents a story from his particular perspective. This leads to the following possibility: A deep collusion between the implied author and the reader goes on behind the narrator’s back. The reader infers a great deal more from the narration than the narrator is aware he is communicating. (Thanks to James Phelan for this idea). (whiny voice—that makes it sound like you know James Phelan, Mr. Big Shot). Let’s stay on course, my friends. The more brilliant you are, the more criticism you receive. One of the central features of The Remains of the Day is that Mr. Stevens is, to put it mildly, often kidding himself. He reviews his past conduct and doesn’t find it lacking. However, the implied author lets the reader see the tragedy and failings of Mr. Stevens’ past, and so, there is collusion—a lot goes over Mr. Stevens’ head, or behind his back. Or—wherever. The Sea is arguably a different beastie, although it also features a first-person narrator who presents his past behavior for judgement. But Max doesn’t spare himself. He shows the reader in relentless detail that he’s been not only a jerk, but in essence, criminally negligent in the deaths of Chloe and Myles Grace. (More on this next time). Indeed, the implied author allows Max to plead his case to the reader, but does not allow Max any delusion. He describes himself as arrogant and self-centered and offers plenty of examples. “Claire, my daughter, has written to ask how I am faring…What age is she now, twenty-something, I am not sure. She is very bright…Not beautiful, however…She is too tall and stark, her rusty hair is coarse and untameable and stands out around her freckled face in an unbecoming manner, and when she smiles she shows her upper gums, glistening and whitely pink. With those spindly legs and big bum, that hair, the long neck especially…she always makes me think of Tenniel’s drawing of Alice when she has taken a nibble from the magic mushroom.” Beautifully written prose, but not a terribly endearing description of one’s daughter. Other examples abound. Max abuses alcohol—a lot. He ridicules other people, putting them down, making fun of their vulnerabilities. And he ridicules himself. It’s clear that he judges himself as lacking in the care he gave his wife, punishing himself for any negative thoughts he had about her. And there’s the whole thing about Chloe and Myles Grace—next week, I said, so settle down. In short, Max is not likable. We the readers have no contradictory data. Max does report some interactions with other characters but—unlike in Remains—we don’t get dis-confirmation of Max’s story from them. However, his saving “grace” is that he is aware of being a jerk and regrets it. In a sense, The Sea is a confessional that lays out Max’s imagined sins. The reader is not asked directly to pronounce judgement, but by inference, and in this sense, the implied author does collude with the reader. There is irony in the use of such a poetic style to show such a story. In other words, the story of The Sea could be presented in a much plainer style without the allusions to classical mythology and Shakespeare. Max could be a much simpler man with little insight. The story of someone confessing imagined sins, too proud perhaps to ask for forgiveness, could be narrated by a sort of Stanley Kowalski-type. But it is not, and this is part of the implied author’s contribution. A question for contemplation: Do we the readers forgive Max? Are we moved enough by his human failings to excuse him? #TheSea #JohnBanville

The premise of The Sea is that, after the death of his wife, a man is grieving, trying to go on but struggling, not only with the loss, but also his own mortality. He is living in the house he and his wife shared, the house their daughter grew up in, but feels estranged from it and is ready to sell. He journeys to a place he stayed at as a child, choosing to take a room in a hotel, The Cedars, which had been the residence of an eccentric family that had captured his attention long ago. A tragedy occurred at this place and time, a tragedy that is gradually foreshadowed and finally revealed. While he is staying at the hotel, great swaths of memory occupy him. He dwells on his childhood, the tragedy, and on the circumstances of his marriage and his wife’s death. So how does he decide to go to The Cedars? The answer involves the story or plot. Max, the protagonist, has a dream. In it, he is walking in a wintry wood. “A dream it was that drew me here. In it, I was walking along a country road, that was all. It was in winter, at dusk, or else it was a strange sort of dimly radiant night, the sort of night that there is only in dreams, and a wet snow was falling. I was determinedly on my way somewhere, going home, it seemed, although I did not know what or where home might be…Something had broken down, a car, no, a bicycle, a boy’s bicycle, for as well as being the age I am now I was a boy as well, a big awkward boy, yes, and on my way home, it must have been home, or somewhere that had been home, once, and that I would recognize again, when I got there. I had hours of walking to do but I did not mind that, for this was a journey of surpassing but inexplicable importance, one that I must make and was bound to complete…I was alone on the road. The snow which had been slowly drifting down all day was unmarked by tracks of any kind, tyre, boot, or hoof, for no one had passed this way and no one would…I felt compassion for myself being dreamed, this poor lummox going along dauntlessly in the snow at fall of day with only the road ahead of him and no promise of homecoming…This was all there was in the dream…I woke into the murk of dawn not as I usually do these days, with the sense of having been flayed of yet another layer of protective skin during the night, but with the conviction that something had been achieved, or at least initiated.” Then he thinks of the Graces and Chloe Grace, the family and the girl who had occupied his attention as a child. “I cannot think why, and it was as if I had stepped suddenly out of the dark into a splash of pale, salt-washed sunlight. It endured only a minute, less than a minute, that happy lightsomeness, but it told me what to do, and where I must go.” A great description of a dream, the feeling state of the self being dreamed. Nothing “happens” seemingly, but it is life-changing. After this, Max reports he and his adult daughter, Claire, drive from Dublin to Bayless, the town where he stayed as a child. He identifies various places remembered from his youth and finally encounters the possible granddaughter of someone he knew long ago—a stranger. To her, he blurts out: “It is just, you see,” I said, “that my wife died.” With Claire, he visits The Cedars, an evocative place the Grace family had lived in. He returns to Dublin and immediately calls the current owner of The Cedars, Miss Vavasour, and arranges to stay at The Cedars for an indefinite time. Although increasingly foreshadowed, the story does not reveal Miss Vavasour’s significance till late. However, clues abound. “I asked her if she remembered me. “Oh yes,” she said without inflexion. “Yes, of course I remember you.” The Cedars is the central locus of the book in that it is from there that Max is telling the story. Claire, who knows her father’s history, says of his staying there: “You’re mad.” His new residence was the scene of an enormous trauma, one that he appears drawn to re-experience, perhaps in order to gain closure, even over his wife’s death, even over mortality, although he never says this directly. It is something that may be inferred by the reader. So, tragedy and an intense dream impel the protagonist to return, later in life, to the place by the sea where he experienced a profound change, a transition from childhood to adulthood. More on this next week, my dear ones. #TheSea #JohnBanville

This week, a new novel: John Banville’s The Sea, published in 2005 and the winner of that year’s Man Booker Prize. It begins: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.” I believe this is the fourth time I’ve read the book, the first time six years ago. Back in 2005, (ten years before that) I’d read a review of it, a review that really stuck with me. Why do we read particular books at particular times? We’re reminded of something, perhaps, or it’s has been sitting unread on our bookshelf for months, years. Anyway, I recall I was initially reluctant to buy The Sea because I understood that it concerned an older man grieving the death of his wife. I thought, huh, death—don’t know if I’m down for a sad story. But I was immediately seduced by the beautiful, poetic prose and the mysterious structure of a story that moves effortlessly through time. (whiny voice. Excuse me, I read The Sea too, I thought it was going to be about ships, but there weren’t any ships in it, no sailors. Not even fish). Muffled voice—call security please. The title is, I believe, a metaphoric expression of the protagonist’s experience of life, unpredictable, dramatic, a powerful symbol of nature’s mindless destructive impact on fragile human existence. (whiny voice recedes. No it’s not! Let go of me! Bullies!) The Sea follows a structure we have seen before, an implied author showing a first-person narrator who tells the story. It has been said by certain clever people that a first person narrator is always unreliable, in that she/he exhibits a particular perspective on a story. More on that to come. Broadly, The Sea concerns a man named Max Morden who is staying at The Cedars, a sort of Bed and Breakfast on the Irish coast, a place familiar from his childhood. Banville says in an interview that the place is based on the town of Rosslare on the southeastern coast, a place he himself spent summers at as a boy. Max is Irish and the setting is contemporary. Max decided to go to The Cedars after having a dream that reminded him of a childhood tragedy that occurred there. He is recently widowed, his wife Anna having died from cancer within the past year. As mentioned, Max narrates the story from the book’s present while staying at The Cedars, and his narration focuses on three times/places: first, the present where he interacts with his landlady, Miss Vavasour, another guest, Colonel Blunden, and his adult daughter, Claire. Second, the recent past spent with his wife Anna, coping with her demise. And third, one more remote, that same Cedars, but fifty years before when Max was a boy of eleven encountering the Grace family, particularly the children Chloe Grace and her brother Myles. The style of the book is poetic, a pleasure, and I find myself slowing the pace of my reading in order to savor the language. “It was a sumptuous, oh, truly a sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue. The countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its reflection in the still surface of a lake. It was the kind of day on which, latterly, the sun for me is the world’s fat eye looking on in rich enjoyment as I writhe in my misery.” A beautiful passage of prose and also one that contains some cues as to the book’s style. Tiepolo, for instance. The implied author assumes the reader knows who Giovanni B. Tiepolo was and has some concept of how a sky could be described as “Tiepolo.” This might be a turn-off to some readers, a damning example of snobbery. Others might feel heartened that they, the happy few, know who the heck Tiepolo was. "Byzantine coppers and golds" is another example that calls for a certain level of sophistication on the reader’s part. Of course, the reader’s busy eye might also just elide such words as unknowns. The use of “sumptuous, oh truly sumptuous” also cues the reader that not only will longer words be found in the text (compare with the tone of “nice, real nice”) but also that the narrator’s voice is dramatic and emotional, speaking directly to the reader (or to someone, more on that too). Can words capture human experience? Or do they shape human experience? Probably both, but the narrator is very assured of the former, making use of deliberate prose and precious little equivocation. The words “perhaps” or “maybe” rarely occur. There is Max, the protagonist, who tells the story in first person, there is a hidden implied author who organizes Max’s entries and language. And there is the real author John Banville who seems curiously separate from Max—to me, at least. Perhaps because Max is named, almost like a character, rather than being an “I.” Perhaps too because Max has had particular experiences—the death of his wife, the interactions with the Grace family, that seem strongly unique and also dramatized. So there is a sense of a storyteller showing Max as he tells his story and of the Graces. After all, my friends, who puts in the paragraph breaks? Huh? The novel is organized into two sections, with internal paragraph breaks within. It suggests a kind of reflective diary, with shifts occurring due to the writer’s whim or preoccupation. The paragraph breaks generally set off changes in time. Next week, let’s look at how the story develops, it’s themes, and that all important question: what’s the point? “Kay. Till then. #TheSea #JohnBanville

One of the ways Olive K. is novel-like is the development throughout the book of the main character, Olive Kitteridge. The first chapter, “Pharmacy,” is, as we know, told from Olive’s husband Henry’s perspective. Here’s the first glimpse of Olive herself. “Mousy,” his wife said, when he hired the new girl. “Looks just like a mouse.” Olive is only seen through Henry’s eyes, and the story is largely about Henry’s yearning for the young woman who works for him, a woman who needs his help. Olive, by contrast, is to Henry, mercurial, dissatisfied, and desirable—what Henry (via the narrator) refers to as “her outer Olive-ness,” which implies he’s aware of more inside her, although he offers no elaboration. He observes how she had outwardly changed with age—“She is not as tall as she used to be, and is broader across the back.” Olive is unfaithful; Henry “understood long ago—after Jim O’Casey’s car went off the road, and Olive spent weeks going straight to bed after supper, sobbing harshly into a pillow—Henry understood then that Olive had loved Jim O’Casey, had possibly been loved by him…” We have an initial sense of Olive being kind of mean, at least to Henry, unfaithful, arrogant and resentful. The next story, “Incoming Tide” presents a different side, still from someone else’s perspective, in this case, Kevin Coulson’s. It is more sympathetic. Olive interrupts, intentionally or not, Kevin’s plans for suicide and shares personal information. “My father…was depressed. And he never talked. Maybe they could have helped him today.” She tells Kevin her father suicided. “Shot himself…No note.” She says her son Christopher is depressed. “I wish I hadn’t passed those genes on to him.” So now against the story of Olive being a difficult and angry wife, there is another, a story of someone who’s aware of being depressed, and communicates guilt over her son. “A Little Burst” is the first story told from Olive’s perspective. “All afternoon, Olive had been fighting the sensation of moving underwater—a panicky, dismal feeling, since she had somehow never managed to learn to swim.” We learn that Olive suffered a heart attack and thinks about her mortality. “Weeping would not have come close to what she felt. She felt fear…Fear that her heart would squeeze shut again, would stop, the way it did once before, a fist punched through her back.” There’s more: “Olive herself has been worried about Christopher’s being lonely. She was especially haunted this past winter by the thought of her son’s becoming an old man, returning home from work in the darkness, after she and Henry were gone.” “Oh, it hurts—actually makes Olive groan as she sits on the bed. What does Suzanne (daughter-in-law) know about a heart that aches so badly at times that a few months ago it almost gave out…?…Her son came to her last Christmastime…and told her what he sometimes thought about. Sometimes I think about just ending it all—…An uncanny echo of Olive’s father, thirty-nine years before.” We have inter-chapter development here, my friends. These are not separate stories but the developing tale of a complex person. However, so far, what the reader experiences is different perspectives on Olive—her husband, friends, neighbors, the narrator. It could be that what we see is the difference between a public crustiness and private, unrevealed suffering. Olive is different than we first thought, then Henry thought. But perhaps she hasn’t really changed. Then in “Security,” Olive faces a severe crisis. Not only has Henry suffered a stroke and must live in a nursing home, mute and largely paralyzed, but her adult son Christopher confronts her about her abusive behavior. She is reduced to sputtering rage by his maturity and resoluteness. She must confront her love for Jim O’Casey, as well as her maltreatment of her husband and son. She must confront the loss of all three men—four, including her father. This is something new; up to this point, she’s managed to keep herself together by denial and icy sarcasm. “But Christopher shook his head. “I’m not going to be ruled by my fear of you, Mom.” Fear of her? How could anyone be afraid of her? She was the one afraid!…Why are you torturing me? she had cried. What are you talking about? All your life I have loved you. And this is what you feel?” At the beginning of the final chapter “River,” Henry has died, and Olive contemplates death. “Let it be quick, she thought now, meaning her death—a thought she had several times a day.” However, by the end, after she meets Jack, we finally get a changed Olive. “And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter?…Her eyes were closed, and throughout her tired self swept waves of gratitude—and regret. She pictured the sunny room, the sun-washed wall, the bayberry outside. It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.” A progression has occurred, of confronting and dealing with loss and moving beyond to a sense of the beauty and meaningfulness of the living world—not a place to rush away from. A significant change in someone always so close to suicide. Can we then argue for the thirteen stories in Olive K. producing a synergy, a sense of the whole being greater than the parts? (which were pretty great on their own). I think so, best beloved. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

Is Olive K. a dis-continuous narrative in the manner of such modernist works as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury? So says the Wikipedia entry for the book. (whiny voice: Shameless name-dropping). Discontinuous narrative -- a narrative style in which the narrative moves back and forth through time. A process that is discontinuous happens in stages with intervals between them, rather than continuously. Huh. First, long-time readers will recognize that the title of this post is similar to one from over a year ago—Where and When. A failure of creativity? A lapse of caring? No, best beloved, they're different. Where or When vs. Where and When. Texts handle continuity in different ways. Film critics talk about establishing shots that visually cue the viewer as to what she/he is seeing. Texts make similar use of written cues, often to establish when and where. Thus in Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (a delight) you have chapter two beginning: “It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas’s, the shortest day of the year. A desolating wind wandered from the north over the hill whereon Oak had watched the yellow wagon and its occupant in the sunshine of a few days earlier.” Well, only the inattentive reader would be lost here. Straight out, the text tells you it’s midnight on the eve of St. Thomas (of course, everyone knows when that is), and that the setting is a place referenced in the previous chapter. Eezy-peezy, as they say. What about The Sound and the Fury?” “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” The reader is left with more questions than answers, no? Where is this taking place? Who is hitting? Hitting what? When does it take place? You have to read on, ya big ape. And it should be said that the reader often brings assumptions to reading a text that provide cues of orientation. If you read Far From the Madding Crowd, you begin by knowing (probably) that it was written in the late 1800s, that it’s set in England, and that it’s highly acclaimed, so that if you don’t like it, you’re a clod. Similarly, with The Sound and the Fury, the reader probably knows it’s a very famous book, set in the American South in the twenties, and a challenging novel that can make its readers feel intelligent and self-congratulatory. It’s quite possible that you’ve had someone, say a whiny voice, “explain” the book, giving you all sorts of preconceptions that, right or wrong, must be worked through. Texts have different styles to cue the reader as to the where and when of what they’re reading. You can have a lot of continuity, you can have dis-continuity. ‘Kay. What about Olive Kitteridge? One story ends and another begins with no explanation. At the conclusion of “Pharmacy” Henry says they should have Daisy and her “fellow” over for dinner soon—what we don’t find is some kind of explanation about how we get to the next story, “Incoming Tide.” Like “The next day, Olive bought a bag of donuts and went to the waterfront where she saw her old student Kevin Coulson sitting in a car watching the water. She thought: oh, oh, he’s in trouble. I’ll help.” The idea is clumsy and laughable, but my point is that in Olive, there is no explanation, no siting of these stories in time. I believe a close reading reveals that most of the present times of the stories occur in a period after Olive and Henry have retired, still an indeterminate stretch of several years. Time meanders, goes back and forth between the perspectives of several different characters. Then, with Henry’s stroke and death, time lurches ahead, as Olive copes with her loss and the re-marriage of her son, Christopher. Finally, she confronts a new relationship with Jack, and in a moving conclusion, realizes she’s not ready to leave life just yet. However, I don’t believe the stories ever go back and forth in time; they generally go forward; it’s just that they don’t spell out the exact interval of time. There are forays into the past, however these are generally handled not as “flashbacks” but as present time memories the characters have of the past. Flashback is a literary device wherein the author depicts the occurrence of specific events to the reader, which have taken place before the present time the narration is following, or events that have happened before the events that are currently unfolding in the story. Here’s an intentionally awkward example: “The backfiring of the bus sent the older man spiraling back to his youth.” The distinction here is an important one. In Olive, what we are often shown is the characters’ experience of the past—not the author’s. Thus, in “Security,” we have Olive remembering Jim O’Casey. “She had first seen him at a town meeting held in the high school gym…There were nights she didn’t fall asleep until morning: when the sky lightened and the birds sang, and her body lay on the bed loosened, and she could not—for all the fear and dread that filled her—stop the foolish happiness.” This is the past mediated through Olive’s consciousness. Here’s a contrast in “A Different Road:” “An awful thing happened to the Kitteridges on a chilly night in June. At the time, Henry was sixty-eight, Olive sixty-nine and while they were not an especially youthful couple, there was nothing about them that gave the appearance of being old, or ill.” This is the narrator’s voice telling the story, and does fit the above definition of flashback, although we often think of flashback as occurring within a story, rather than as a separate chapter. In any case, the usual beastie in Olive is that the past is shown—not by the narrator—but by the narrator showing a memory of one of the characters. “Kay. It seems we’ve once again painted ourselves into a corner. (whiny voice. What do you mean “we,” Mr. Pretentious Bully?) Olive is not a continuous narrative, but it is neither a text-book dis-continuous narrative. Does the use of flashbacks and/or the showing of characters’ memories make a narrative dis-continuous? No. (whiny voice. Isn’t Flashback the name of the movie where the woman dances and gets the water dumped on her?) No. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

‘Kay. A long post today, so let’s begin. No interruptions, please, we can take questions at the end. Last week, we considered the concept of willy wonty and how this structure in a story poses the question: will a protagonist do something or will she/he not. We suggested that other structures may be more successful. “…the most obvious way to create it (tension), is by simply saying something is going to happen, and then putting it off.” “We wonder how and when and why,” (something will happen) instead of if. (Whiny voice—Excuse me, excuse me, Mr. Big Shot, aren’t you making stuff up again?). Pause…Well, you haven’t been around lately. (I was on vacation). At one time, it may have been legitimate to call willy wonty a neologism, yes. Did you read last week’s post? (I was on vacation). I see. (…Mr. Big Shot, since you’re writing this blog, aren’t I a part of you?) Long pause……I wasn’t on vacation last week. Perhaps we could talk about this after today’s post is done. (‘Kay. Wake me when it’s over). Let’s move on and consider another story in Olive, the third, I believe: “The Piano Player” begins, “Four nights a week Angela O’Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge at the Warehouse Bar and Grill.” This begs the question, how and why does Angie play four nights a week at the Warehouse? What does it mean that she does? Also, who the heck is Angie? It does not raise a willy wonty question like: will Angie play at the Warehouse or not? The story (and the narrator) states resolutely that she does play there. Not what will happen, but what is happening. As the story develops, we find that it is very much about answering the question why she is playing there. The story also says a lot about who Angie is and what it means for her that she’s playing four nights a week at the Warehouse. If willy wonty is used effectively, tension and interest are created. But this story doesn’t use willy wonty—is there tension in “The Piano Player?” And is its resolution foreshadowed? There’s tension created by that first sentence—she plays the piano four times a week at the Warehouse—something’s going to happen. What is it? The fact that the story is part of Olive creates some foreshadowing itself. The reader expects that this is a story set in Crosby, Maine and that Olive Kitteridge will appear in it (she does, a walk on). By this point in the book the reader expects that the story will be about the drama of a “small life,” as Pierre Michon would say. It will not be about a heroic or idealized character but an average person leading a “life of quiet desperation.” (who said that?). “If anything, her face revealed itself too clearly in a kind of simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman of her age.” So at the start of the story, she’s still expecting something in life, still open, still acting young. The structure is that there is that first line that establishes the story and poses questions. First paragraph does this too. Then a description of Angie, a long paragraph. Then, “On this particular Friday night, Christmas was a week away…” A description of the heavily decorated Xmas tree, rather like Angie. A shift to the thoughts of Joe the bartender, who has realized Angie has stage fright and drinks, the narrator says. “…she had years ago learned to begin swallowing vodka at five fifteen.” First several pages are a lot of exposition about who Angie is, set in the context of her playing piano “on this particular Friday night.” Not much happens till later, but the reader has a sense of tension, that something will happen, because you expect that in a story. There’s the walk-on for Olive and Henry. Walter Dalton is sitting at the bar, a fan, a gay man and a drunk. The reader gets the sense of an audience watching and listening to Angie and her piano. A lot of imperfect tense stuff. “He never bought her gifts and she wouldn’t have wanted him to.” Then, Simon comes in, an old lover. This is the precipitating incident for the story. “…there was something in the way he ducked, or moved, that ever so slightly fogged her mind. But she was shaky tonight.” So at this point we know much more about Angie. She lives alone, has carried on a long-term affair with Malcolm, a married man. She has always cultivated an attractive appearance. Her mother is in a nursing home. She has worked for years as a performer but has stage fright that she manages by drinking. And a man from her past has come in to the bar “on this particular night.” That’s why the night is important and there’s a story about it. She asks for another drink. She imagines talking later to Joe and Walter, “…and she would tell them about visiting her mother in the nursing home today; she might or might not mention the bruises on her mother’s arm.” This is why she’s shaky, although the reason isn’t revealed till the end. The man—Simon—asks her to play “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” surely a meaning-laden song, but she doesn’t. “But it was like she had fallen overboard and had to swim through seaweed. The darkness of the man’s coat seemed to press against her head, and there was a watery terror that had to do with her mother; get inside, she thought.” Foreshadowing, if you please. She takes a break—an unheard of event. She phones Malcom and tells him she can’t do this anymore (their affair). She returns to piano and plays the song Simon wanted. She regards the Xmas tree. “…for a moment felt baffled that people did this to trees—decorated them with all that glitter…in a few weeks the tree would be stripped, taken down, hauled out onto the sidewalk with tinsel still sticking to it…” This may be a mise en abyme sighting—she is like the tree, all dressed up and then discarded by people who only care about her for a time. She thinks about her affair with Simon. He broke it off. “It’s like I have to date both you and your mother. It gives me the creeps.” He was the only man she’d ever told that her mother was a prostitute. She told Simon everything, including that her mother had prevented her from taking a scholarship at a music school. In the bar, he seems unfriendly. Finally he steps up to the piano. “You couldn’t make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You just had to wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn’t go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.” This is fine writing, free indirect speech? A combination of the narrator’s voice and Angie’s inner voice. She’s thinking about her feelings for Simon, maybe her mother, too. Simon clumsily tells her that her mother seduced him. “And I’ve been feeling pretty sorry for you, Angie, all these years.” He leaves—apparently he came up from Boston to tell her about her mother. Why now? Angie muses that it was to make himself feel better by hurting her—schadenfreude? (pleasure derived by another person's misfortune). Walking home, she encounters Malcolm. He’s abusive, tells her never to call him at home again, only at work. She realizes she’ll never call him again anywhere. She returns to her room, actually to the liminal space of her stairs. We have more free indirect speech—difficult to distinguish Angie’s inner voice from the narrator’s. “A face like an angel. A drunk. Her mother sold herself to men. Never married, Angela?” She decides she’s no less pathetic than any of them. Tomorrow at the bar, she’ll get there early and tell Joe about her mother. “Imagine someone pinching an old paralyzed woman like that.” She had figured something out too late. She would, “… stop thinking about the bruises on her mother’s upper arm, that thin arm with its slack soft skin, so loose from the bone that when you squeezed it in your fingers, it was hard to imagine it could feel anything.” She’s trying to figure out what she feels, she gets drunk to not feel afraid, but it’s diminished her ability to feel anything. The beginning, why does she play four nights a week at the Warehouse? So she won’t feel. She’s abusing her mother but is pretending to herself she’s not. The main event in the story, Simon’s appearance and revelation, breaks through Angie’s denial and causes an epiphany—although not a pleasant one. Four nights a week, Angie has been playing romantic and sentimental songs to please people, and this is a sort of mise en abyme of her life spent trying to please others. This story is about how she can’t do it any longer. She can’t dress up like a Christmas tree and ignore herself and she can’t continue to please Malcom either. He doesn’t please her. Neither does her mother. Questions? #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

The fifth story in Olive, “Starving” begins: “At the marina on Saturday morning, Harmon had to work not to stare at the young couple.” This immediately begs the question, why did Harmon have to work not to stare? What, by implication, was so interesting about the couple? Of course, also, who is Harmon and who is the young couple? The reader might hope the story would answer all these questions. We have some context—because it’s a chapter in Olive Kitteridge, the story will involve Olive somehow and will be set in Crosby, Maine. So how does the story answer the question, why is Harmon trying to hide his interest in the couple? There’s no question of whether or not Harmon is interested in them. He is, it says so. It does not begin, “At the marina on Saturday morning, will Harmon stare at the young couple or will he not?” Or, “At the marina on Saturday morning, Harmon tried to decide whether or not to leave Bonnie for Daisy.” Harmon is an older gent who owns the hardware store in Crosby. He is married long-term to Bonnie but she has told him she is no longer interested in sex. Right or wrong, he is carrying on a casual affair with a woman named Daisy. In his fine book, Writing in General and in the Short Story in Particular, Rust Hills writes about different ways to create suspense and reader curiosity in fiction. “The sort of suspense created by conflict is what Jessamyn West is supposed to have called “willy wonty,” the reader’s uncertainty as to whether a character “will” or “won’t” commit an act, decide a matter, do a deed, choose one instead of another, give up or go on, marry the girl or let her go. Willy wonty can be a wonderfully effective way of getting the reader to read on: it is the suspenseful reaction at its simplest.” However, “…the most obvious way to create it (tension), is by simply saying something is going to happen, and then putting it off.” “We wonder how and when and why,” (something will happen). The couple Harmon is trying not to stare at are Nina White and her boyfriend, Tim Burnham. Harmon encounters them at the local restaurant, what he’s trying to avoid is their physical and sexual involvement with one another—their display of sexuality. Nina is pretty and seductive although strikingly thin. Harmon encounters them again in his store and overhears Nina saying that someone has a “fuck buddy.” Again, he tries to conceal his fascination. He later phones one of his adult sons and asks him the meaning of “fuck buddy.” The answer, his bemused son explains, is that it refers to a casual sexual relationship. Harmon decides this is what he’s been having with Daisy and that it’s not what he wants. He explains to Daisy that he wants them to get to know each other and be more intimate before being sexual. She agrees. Then, by coincidence, Nina appears at Daisy’s house in distress over her anorexia. Harmon meets her. While he’s there at Daisy’s, Olive appears and shocks Harmon, who’s known her a long time, by bursting into tears over Nina’s plight. Olive finished the doughnut, wiped the sugar from her fingers, sat back and said, “You’re starving.” The girl didn’t move, only said, “Uh—duh.” “I’m starving, too,” Olive said. The girl looked over at her. “I am,” Olive said. “Why do you think I eat every doughnut in sight?” “You’re not starving,” Nina said with disgust. “Sure I am. We all are.” Eventually, Nina goes off to treatment but regrettably dies. Later, Harmon is troubled by encountering an elderly woman, Bessie Davis, at the hardware store. “Harmon felt a rush of anxiety as she left. Some skin that had stood between himself and the world seemed to have been ripped away, and everything was close, and frightening. Bessie Davis had always talked on, but now he saw her loneliness as a lesion on her face. The words Not me, not me crossed over his mind. And he pictured the sweet Nina White sitting on Tim Burnham’s lap outside the marina, and he thought, Not you, not you, not you.” He tells Daisy he’s in love with her and they begin a more passionate sexual affair. “What had begun—not when they were “fuck buddies” but as a sweet interest in the other—questions probing the old memories, a shaft of love moving toward his heart, sharing the love and grief of Nina’s brief life, all this was now, undeniably, a ferocious and full-blown love, and his heart itself seemed to know this…He was waiting now—living in the hallucinatory world of Daisy Foster’s generous body—waiting for the day, and he knew it would come, when he left Bonnie or when she kicked him out…waiting…for open-heart surgery, not knowing if he would die on the table, or live.” So, if we return to the beginning and the question posed by the opening sentence—why does Harmon have to work at not staring at the young couple—we now have an answer. Because he’s trying to avoid love. His journey is from denial of how he feels to acceptance of it. Like Olive Kitteridge herself, he’s been starved for love and dreading loneliness. The story could have been willy wonty—will Harmon connect with Daisy or won’t he—but it’s not structured that way. Ms. Strout directs the narrator not to withhold a secret the way a willy wonty story might demand. Her stance as an author is to say, “Harmon’s love for Daisy is inevitable—here’s how it plays out.” Thank you. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

First, a personal note. For the first time in some sixty weeks, my blog did not have a new entry last Thursday. Readers were, I know, concerned and despondent. But I had no way to reach all of you because the problem was that our internet router failed. With no internet, we were thrown back into a twilight world of reading books and…talking. Well, things have returned to “normal.” The second chapter of Olive, “Incoming Tide,” presents two themes that occur throughout the book, first, the way the past marks the present—often for worse, and second, how people save each other, sometimes quite literally. Olive Kitteridge herself makes an appearance—and, my friends, it is more than a cameo. Incoming Tide is the story of Kevin, who returns to the town of Crosby, where he’d lived till age twelve, with the intention of killing himself. He sits in his car, watching the bay, a rifle wrapped in a blanket in the back seat. “The bay had small whitecaps and the tide was coming in, so the smaller rocks could be heard moving as the water shifted them.” Perhaps this opening is a metaphor for a powerful force that inexorably alters things, even things as solid as rock. Huh. After two longish paragraphs, the story shifts to the perspective of Patty Howe, who works in the small restaurant on the bay. She is aware of Kevin sitting in a car, is vaguely disturbed by him, although he is at first unfamiliar. Then, “she suddenly knew who the man was, and something passed over her, like a shadow crossing in front of the sun.” For Patty had known Kevin when they were both children. Her mother had encouraged her to play with Kevin, and Patty had been afraid of Kevin “and his mother—tall, dark-haired, deep-voiced.” This dual perspective on the same scene is a feature of Olive. Maybe it could be called a way of emphasizing the subjectivity of experience. Different people “see” the same things in different ways, depending on who they are. Another philosophical assumption of Olive is that people are a lot about their pasts. The past claims the characters, shapes them in ways they are aware of but may choose to resist. Back to Kevin. It’s revealed delicately that his mother shot herself to death when he was a boy, and that he discovered her body. The trauma is with him still; he’s tried to have a “normal” life, studying to be a psychiatrist, but suffers from depression and intends to end it all—in such a way that children will not discover his body. Suddenly Olive Kitteridge appears. “…his body jumped a little to see a woman staring through the passenger window, her face close, staring straight at him. “Mrs. Kitteridge. Holy shit…” A great entrance. Olive was Kevin’s seventh-grade teacher. Much to his surprise, she gets in his car. They make small-talk and observe Patty Howe coming out of the restaurant to collect flowers from the shoreline where waves crash against the seawall. Kevin tells Olive that he’s in a residency to become a psychiatrist. After a moment, Mrs. Kitteridge said, “Well your mother may not have been able to help it.” “He felt the strain of some sadness make its way from her to him. Gusts of wind were now swooping in all directions, so that the bay looked like a crazily frosted cake, peaks rising one way, then another…I’ve thought of you, Kevin Coulson,” she said. “I have.” A nice development of the opening metaphor of the incoming tide, as well as wonderful pacing. Tension increases as the current conversation between Kevin and Olive dredges up the past—presented by the narrator who has crawled inside Kevin’s head. Then another paragraph break, and a return to Patty’s perspective. She notices “…Mrs. Kitteridge had joined Kevin Coulson in the car, and it gave her a feeling of safety, having Mrs. Kitteridge with him. She couldn’t have said why, and didn’t dwell on it.” (By the way, here‘s a great example of the narrator telling the story—not Patty who “couldn’t have said why.”) Has Olive gotten into Kevin’s car on purpose because she sensed he was going to suicide? Or is it a more random act that evolves into an intervention? We can only infer the answer as, in this chapter, we have no access to Olive’s mind. Back to Kevin, who wishes Olive would leave so he can shoot himself. She talks about mental illness and heredity, and Kevin thinks about his ex-girlfriend Clara and then how he himself never felt at home anywhere. Suddenly, he doesn’t want Olive to go. He begins to tell her, but at that point, she sees Patty fall into the ocean, the incoming tide. Olive leaps from the car, shouting at Kevin to come help. He does so, jumping into the water without much thought and holding Patty safely while Olive gets more help. “He would not let her go…oh, insane, ludicrous, unknowable world! Look how she wanted to live, look how she wanted to hold on.” This ending moves very close to Kevin’s inner-ness so that it’s difficult to determine whether it’s he or the narrator telling the story. Free indirect speech, we’ve seen it before. (Shhh—it’s a sign of the implied author). So, we have Olive saving Kevin and Kevin saving Patty. Maybe Patty saves Kevin too? Her falling into the sea spurs Kevin—who’s already been saved by Olive—to risk death to save her. He experiences someone who’s desperate to live. Ironic, as Jordan Catalano used to say. I would say, life then, is the powerful force that moves the rocks of Kevin’s resolve. He jumps out of his past to literally embrace life. This issue of how much the past determines the present is big in Olive. We will have to examine it more. Till then. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout

This week, a new book, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008. Ms. Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive, and HBO based a four-part miniseries on the story that appeared in 2014. (Worth watching—a fine adaptation). I first read Olive after seeing the miniseries in 2014 and subsequently read all of Elizabeth Strout’s books. As often happens, it’s hard not to picture the story’s characters represented by the actors in the series—particularly Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins—but worse things could happen. Olive is a series of thirteen chapters and each one can be thought of as a short story—in fact, about half of them were originally published as short stories in The New Yorker and other magazines/journals. They are united in two ways: first they all have to do with the lives of people living in Crosby, Maine, a fictional town that seems eminently real, and second, each story involves the character of Olive Kitteridge, some only mentioning her tangentially, others written about her. This structure begs the question—is there a synergistic thingee going on here? What effect does a book have that’s a series of stories about different characters united by their relationships with a central character? And what effect does the order of the stories have? We’ll have to delve into these matters, best beloved. An interesting fact: on the front cover of the 2008 Random House edition, there’s the title and author’s name, a gold circle with the words “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” And below the evocative image of a dried leaf, the word “fiction.” I think it’s interesting that the book designer and publisher thought it necessary to identify Olive as fiction vs. non-fiction or biography. Readers of this blog’s entries on Sebald’s The Emigrants will no doubt smile knowingly. Long time readers of this blog (you happy few) know that I am very interested in the narrative structure of fiction. Olive provides a delightful example of how an author can create a storyteller who is both anonymous in a formal sense, and also intensely familiar. A voice that is not the flesh and blood author, but an entity whom we imagine telling us the story. (The reader may well imagine it is Ms. Strout herself telling the story, an impression abetted by the author’s photograph on the inside jacket—an image of a smiling middle-aged woman. I say—NO! It’s not her! It’s a separate entity. Long time readers of this blog might say (perhaps in a whiny voice) what’s the difference between these dang entities? What the heck are you talking about? What I’m talking about are distinctions between at least three entities. There is the real author, Elizabeth Strout, who wrote Olive Kitteridge and labored mightily to get it published (thank you). There is the book’s narrator, in this case, an essentially anonymous voice that tells the story in consistent and beautiful prose. And there is the implied author. The implied author can be thought of as a personality a step removed from the narrator, an imaginary entity whom the reader assumes is responsible for decisions about the type of narrator—that is, there are many types of narrators; first-person, second-person, narrators that are actual characters in a story, narrators that are nearly invisible and anonymous, and so on. The implied author can be detected in all the details of the story’s style; not only the type of narrator but verb tense, language choice, chapter divisions, perspective, etc. As I said, the reader may imagine the implied author is simply Ms. Strout and be done with it. It’s a fuzzy distinction at best. The point is that Ms. Strout has written other stories and books that—while they do have a consistent style—are dissimilar in the ways that make Olive a consistent work. Although written by the same author, Olive Kitteridge is distinct from My Name Is Lucy Barton. It is not hard to detect the narrator. “Three hours ago, while the sun was shining full tilt thought the trees and across the back lawn, the local podiatrist, a middle-aged man named Christopher Kitteridge, was married to a woman from out of town named Suzanne. This is the first marriage for both of them, and the wedding has been a smallish, pleasant affair…So far, the polite cheerfulness of the guests seems to show no sign of running down, and Olive Kitteridge…is thinking it’s really high time everyone left.” So here we have the narrator telling us things that the characters might or might not be aware of—the sun is shining. The local podiatrist is named Christopher—would he think this about himself? Probably not. It’s the first marriage for both bride and groom—again, they may think this about themselves but not in the way it’s presented in the story. Real people might have occasion to think: “I’m me—the sum of my sensations and memories. I’m the podiatrist around here—the local podiatrist, and I’m getting married. The sun is out. I haven’t been married before, neither has Christine.” Maybe if a real person met someone new and wanted to explain what was going on: “Hello. I’m Christopher Kittridge, and I’m marrying Christine. It’s pretty sunny, eh? I’m a podiatrist, haven’t been married before. That’s my mother Olive over there. She always looks that way.” Yes, in this chapter, “A Little Burst,” Olive appears in the first paragraph. She’s described as thinking it’s time the wedding was over, impatiently, perhaps—described as feeling this way, not shown as feeling this way. “When is this damn thing going to be over?” Olive thought,” would show it. The whole section (as well as the whole book) is in the storyteller’s voice—not the characters’. Beautiful imagery and simile that does not typically occur to real people. The protagonist of the second chapter, Kevin, is looking at the harbor. ”The salt air filled his nose, the wild rugosa bushes with their white blossoms brought him a vague confusion; a sense of sad ignorance seemed cloaked in their benign white petals.” This is the narrator’s voice—unless Kevin is very poetic, which he doesn’t seem to be. There are wonderful descriptions of complex, ambiguous emotional states. “Henry stands up, Daisy Foster fleetingly through his mind, her smile as she spoke of going dancing. The relief that he just felt over Denise’s note, that she is glad for the life that unfolded before her, gives way suddenly queerly, into an odd sense of loss, as if something significant has been taken from him. “Olive,” he says.” Again, this is the narrator describing Henry’s inner state in its own words—not Henry’s. ‘Kay. Next week we will plunge further. A slippery slope? Maybe. Till then. #OliveKitteridge #ElizabethStrout