Bayou Pages | “Tell Me Everything” By Elizabeth Strout

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“Happiness is a choice as much as anything. Or you could choose to be angry, and if you stay angry long enough, it will become comfortable, like an old robe.”

As a newcomer to Elizabeth Strout, I belatedly realized the existing lives of the characters in Tell Me Everything, as Strout carries over characters from previous works, as if each novel is a new stage. Set in Maine, retired attorney Bob Burgess lives for his frequent walks with writer Lucy Barton, the two sharing intimate details of their lives, a love affair without the professed love or the physical intimacy, as each is in committed relationships. Olive Kitteridge, now 90 and a friend of Bob’s, invites  Lucy over to share stories, the untold stories of ordinary lives. Each subplot/shared story is compelling and detailed, remarkable in an everyday, could-be-anyone sort of way. This is how I interpreted Strout’s characters, not uninteresting and yet unremarkable. They’re everyday people doing everyday things, people we might know or have known, people we’d forget if we didn’t bump into them periodically.

These traded conversations, while sounding uninspired, lay the groundwork for the mystery portion of the novel, the discovery of an older woman’s body in town. Police suspect her son Matt Beach, whom Bob begrudgingly agrees to represent, and the details of the evolving case are interwoven into the continued shared stories. The simplicity of Strout’s prose is complicated in this fashion of threading, of building the important into the seemingly unimportant. Strout deconstructs human emotion one thread at a time, layering the complexity of feelings into the absence of what goes unsaid. What Strout manages not to tell is as captivating as what she lays bare, the sudden shifts in behavior from a character we feel like we know but are reminded we don’t. 

Strout’s 10th novel Tell Me Everything is extraordinary in its simplicity. Shortly after I read the book, I had trouble recalling the plot points, but could still feel the sentiment. It’s not a matter of what happened, or even why, but that it did. Strout writes, “How did she live without any human touch to her skin? Somehow she existed without it, many people do. Yet one has to wonder about the toll it takes, the lack of being touched or held. So many people are not.” In a book where few characters are alone, she ruminates on loneliness, that feeling of isolation regardless of company. Strout asks what happens when we find moments of reprieve from loneliness, and what happens to the untold stories? If our stories end when we do, did they ever really happen? And pointedly, does it even matter? Not everyone will like this book, but I did. If you can’t tell from this review, I’ve struggled to explain why. Perhaps that’s the point. 

“We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they may not be completely so. We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.”