Small Moments Become Powerful In 'Olive Kitteridge'

To southern New Englanders, Maine winters suggest lives played out in too-close quarters, while outside, snow makes escape impossible. Cabin fever sharpens tempers and prompts fits of self-examination. Something has to give.

Simmering in this psychological pressure cooker, Elizabeth Strout's characters can last for years before exploding.

None of them are very happy. Most miserable of all is the big, ungainly schoolteacher Olive Kitteridge, an angry woman who stomps resolutely through these stories.

Written over more than a decade by a Maine native who returns to her home state in fiction, these loosely linked stories are miracles of compression. Strout packs them so tightly that even the small moments are powerful.

Olive doesn't like many people, can't talk to the ones she loves and only occasionally lapses into moments of kindness.

In "Pharmacy," her husband Henry dreams of happiness, if not for himself, then for others. When Henry raises the subject, son Christopher responds harshly, "Why do you need everyone married?" adding, "Why can't you just leave people alone?"

He is cut from the same cloth as Olive, and this edgy, unfortunate mother-son relationship is the source of all her hopes and most of her grief.

Her life is a patchwork of miscommunication. When Christopher marries, when he moves away and when he comes back into Olive's life with a second wife they try, but they can't get along.

Olive resents Henry. Until he's felled by a stroke ("Tulips"), she can't manage to tell him she loves him. She despises her new daughter-in-law and says so, and though she likes the second wife, she'll mess up that encounter.

Olive goes through life making messes. Trapped in the bedroom while her son's wedding party goes on downstairs, she reflects:

"Olive can understand why Chris has never bothered having many friends. He is like her in that way, can't stand the blah-blah-blah. And they'd just as soon blah-blah-blah about you when your back is turned."

Those Maine winters must be hell, but good times do surface. In "Starving," where Olive has a walk-on, a man hoping to retrieve one of the good parts of the past asks his wife if she'll make popcorn balls for Christmas.

"God in heaven, no," she says, "Whenever your mother made those, I thought my teeth would come out." They laugh and "he felt a splintering of love and comfort and pain spread through him."

For comfort, the troubled man turns to Olive and his sort-of flame Daisy, who bond over a hippie girl who just died.

In only one story, "A Different Road," does violence come to the surface. Olive lands in an E.R. after a gastric explosion; masked gunmen hold up the place. Lives are at risk but the true damage comes in what she and Henry say to each other.

Olive and Christopher try to connect when she flies to New York to take care of his pregnant wife's kids by two other men, but like every other chance she's had, Olive botches this one:

"Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed."

Then she gets to the heart of the matter: "It was never enough, was it?"

It isn't and in the end, Olive settles. Not happy, perhaps, but through the grace of her creator, not quite so miserable.

It's hard to explain what goes on in these stories without sending the reader to the collection. It's all there, and drab as these lives are, they are also filled with power and passion.