This is how atypical Elizabeth Strout is among New Yorkers: When you enter her cozy one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, all you see are sunshine and pastels. True, this is days after she won the Pulitzer Price for fiction, and much of the unexpected colour comes from the fresh-cut flowers that were sent along in congratulations by friends and associates and old college acquaintances. But the cheery palette is everywhere in the narrow main room, on a pair of light-coloured couches and on the pillows that adorn them, and on the side tables; Strout herself is dressed in a pale, peachy-pink shirt and three-quarter-length khakis that, with her bare feet, make it seem like she's ready to go clam digging on a beach back in Maine, where she grew up.
“A friend of mine from Park Slope came over. She goes, ‘Oh my God, you've made a New England cottage!'” laughs Strout.
But if her physical environment seems torn from a Martha Stewart magazine, Strout's internal landscape is several shades darker. Olive Kitteridge, the book which won her the Pulitzer, consists of 13 interlocking stories that add up to a devastating portrait of stout, quiet suffering. Even as Strout shifts her point of view from one tale to the next, building up a fractured panorama of the fictional small town of Crosby, Me., and its people, she focuses on the title character, a retired seventh-grade teacher left marooned in loneliness by her stubborn refusal to change with the rest of the world. In its citation, the Pulitzer committee noted the stories pack “a cumulative emotional wallop, bound together by polished prose and by Olive, the title character, blunt, flawed and fascinating.” The book can leave you feeling disoriented but wiser, like listening to an accurate palm reading.
With Olive Kitteridge, which came out in paperback last fall, Strout has now written three novels set in New England's past. Her debut, Amy and Isabelle (1998), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, tells the story of a single mother and her daughter, who develops a relationship with a high-school math teacher.
Abide With Me (2006) focuses on a small-town minister who loses his wife, and the effect of her death on his family.
While each of her books is written with evident love, Strout has a fierce and ambivalent relationship with her roots. One ancestor landed in New England even before the Mayflower crew touched Plymouth Rock, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say she has spent most of her 53 years trying to escape the gravitational pull of that long line and its Puritanism and hostility toward outsiders. That is partly why it took Strout until her early 40s to finish her first book: Writing so close to the bone, she was afraid of offending someone.
I was just not cut out to be a lawyer, not even remotely, and sort of didn't know that about myself — Elizabeth Strout
“I think that it's been a long struggle for me to just go ahead and say things that I want to say,” she nods. “One would hope to be past that. And I'm certainly getting past it. You know, part of this New England, old-fashioned, Puritanical background concerned itself very much with the sense of high morality, which was a construct – I don't know if that's the right word, but it's obviously a man-made application of what is right and what is wrong. My brother and I both suffered very deeply from: ‘Have we done, morally, the wrong thing?'”
Strout's feet are tucked under her on the couch, but she is otherwise extremely animated, her long hands painting the air to emphasize her points, and her face twisting frequently into sour grimaces, or smiles that seem more ambivalent than happy.
