"Tell Me Everything"

Where characters pop up like "Whack a Mole."

The kitchen sink school of writing. That’s where you throw all the characters into a sink full of soapy water, and see who bubbles to the surface squeaky clean, and who sinks to the bottom so covered with grease they can never float.  Some are more important than others, some stay with you longer than others. They all relate in some tangential fashion, but do we need all those characters?

This was the question I thought about recently in reading Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, “Tell Me Everything.” Yes, there is crotchety old Olive Kitteridge, whose earlier novel provided a Pulitzer Prize for Elizabeth Strout. She’s living in a retirement home and seems to be lonely, although because she’s so crotchety it’s hard to figure out whether that’s just her personality. The novel begins with Lucy Barton, a novelist who moved from Manhattan to Maine during the pandemic with her first husband William, (the subject of her last novel called “Lucy by the Sea”). Olive Kitteridge contacts Lucy Barton and tells her that she has some stories to tell her. This forms the loose fabric that ties the novel together.

One of the first stories that Olive tells Lucy is about Olive’s mother, who had fallen in love with a man but was separated from him by his family, who thought she wasn’t good enough for him. Ultimately, her mother married someone else as does her lover. Then her husband shoots himself in the kitchen. Olive learned based on a newspaper clipping she found in her mother’s purse after her death that the former flame named his two daughters Olive and Isa, the same as Olive Kitteridge and her sister. Sad, they both conclude. So sad. This leads Olive to say that ghosts live in people’s relationships. There are plenty of ghosts in this book.

One reason the novel reminded me of the kitchen sink is because it includes what appears to be a murder mystery tucked within several domestic narratives of former spouses, current spouses who may not remain current etc. There is a lot of coming and going to think about as well as who killed Matt‘s mother. Bob Burgess, who is a lawyer (as is his brother Jim who practices in Manhattan) takes on Matt‘s case and ultimately takes on responsibility for Matt’s life, even though he’s not sure that Matt is innocent.

What kind of novel is this? I took a writing course where editors said that when they read the first 10 pages of a novel, they want to know who the main characters are and what kind of novel they’re reading. If we applied that advice to this novel, we would not suspect that the novel would be a murder mystery--not only because we don’t meet Matt or his soon-to-be-dead mother in the first 10 pages but also because this appears to be a relatively slow moving novel where we expect that we’re going to see Olive and Lucy again and again in Olive’s living room telling stories. (that happens too.)

We also expect that we are going to see Lucy and Bob Burgess, who is married to Margaret, a narcissistic do-gooder of a minister, to develop the relationship which began in “Lucy by the Sea,” where they started meeting outdoors (pandemic) having deep conversations.

Olive thinks that Lucy and Bob are in love. They certainly are excited to see each other, and they tell each other things that they do not tell their spouses. Bob is secretly smoking again, and Lucy helps him keep his secret. It’s not clear as the novel progresses if this is enough to break up two relationships.

Despite all the kitchen sink characters,  the novel centers on four people, Bob Burgess and his wife Margaret and William and his former wife Lucy. But there are plenty of former spouses around to complicate matters. Bob’s former spouse Pam remarried, but became an alcoholic and suspects her husband of having an affair with her best friend. That leads us down the rabbit hole: will Pam gets sober or won’t she? Will she leave her husband or won’t she? What, if anything, does this have to do with Olive, Lucy, William and Bob?

I started wondering why couples broke up, why they married other people, and at least in the case of William and Lucy, why some couples get back together again after they’ve divorced.

My grandfather was euphemistically called a “ladies man.” I witnessed it on our Sunday night dinners when he would take me, a pre-adolescent, out to a nice restaurant and flirt with the waitress. It didn’t occur to me at the time to wonder what my grandmother was doing for dinner. Perhaps she was eating a tuna salad sandwich by herself, maybe leafing through the pages of The Ladies Home Journal and looking at the column called “Can this Marriage be Saved?,” which recycled the same sad stories month after month with different characters. But this was after my grandparents had divorced and gotten back together.

In 1947, the year before I was born, my grandfather married a woman he’d met at the Princeton Tavern. Her name was Gladys. She had red hair. He must have asked my grandmother to move to Las Vegas from New Jersey to establish residence for six weeks to get a Las Vegas divorce. I never heard my grandmother refer to those six weeks, which must have been worse than eating tuna salad sandwiches at home.

I don’t know how long my grandfather was married to Gladys. We have an excellent genealogist in my family, our daughter Claire. She has scoured records to figure out when they got divorced. But by the time I was conscious of matters, let’s say age four, Gladys was gone, and my grandfather was living alone in a small stone house on the large family farm, having abandoned the “big house” where he had ensconced Gladys for their short-lived marriage. My grandmother was living in an apartment in a nearby town and worked the night shift as a telephone operator at Princeton Hospital.

When I was ten, my grandfather bought a beautiful horse farm in Hopewell, New Jersey and moved there with my grandmother. They acted like a married couple, although they did not actually remarry until my senior year in high school seven years later. I attended the wedding. My grandmother had a large diamond ring on her hand. No one talked about why they hadn’t gotten married in the last seven years or what each of them thought about getting remarried. Their story today strikes me as one that could’ve been told between Olive and Lucy.

There is another mystery at the heart of Tell Me Everything having to do with the death of Bob and Jim‘s mother, who was run over by accident by their car in their driveway. Bob was told he was playing in the driver’s seat and released the brake, but it may have been Jim who was actually at fault. Jim confesses to his son, who refuses to forgive him. Will the brothers discover the truth? Will one of them apologize to the other or will they never know what actually happened when they were young and their mother died?

In “Tell Me Everything,” we gradually start to see that the stories of these small town people with dashed hopes and dreams are leading to a big question. Lucy tells Olive about Addie, a young woman Lucy knew in college, who was raised by a single mother and although very beautiful and cast in all the theater productions, ultimately worked selling dresses at a mall and died of cancer when she was in her early 30s. Lucy feels Addie’s life had no meaning.

Lucy asks Olive:

“what gives a life meaning? “

Olive says:"Lucy Barton, are you asking me what the point was of this young woman's life? What is the point of anyone's life?"

Lucy looked at her. "Well. Yeah. What is the point of anyone's life?"

"I thought you believed in God,"

Lucy says she doesn’t believe in a father figure up in the clouds:

‘I do believe-that there's something larger than us. But that doesn't help me with the question: What is the point of anyone's life?"

Olive thought about this. "Well, Henry and I believed that the point to our lives was to work hard and help people. So we did." Olive started to rock her foot up and down and she looked out the window.

There is a lot of looking out windows in this novel. The question also leads to a big fight between Lucy and Bob. She tells the Addie story to Bob, believing that this story should amount to something more than life was hard and she died young. This leads Bob to exclaim in exasperation:

“Lucy you sound like you’re 10 years old.”

[Bob has recently had an unfortunate too-short haircut and Lucy retorts]:

“Well, you look like you’re 12 years old.”

Bob then asks whether the lives of the people dead in the Ukraine have meaning, and Lucy corrects him that he should’ve said “Ukraine,” not “the Ukraine.” They’ve each wounded the other and it is not clear that their relationship, whatever it is, can survive.

Yet, it seems that after all, this is the heart of the novel, whether all these different lives, which intersect, connect, disconnect, and reconnect have any inherent meaning. Bob tells Lucy during their fight that he thinks the point of a life is love:

“What about love? Isn't that what life might be about?" He smoked for a moment and then he added, "And for all your worry about Addie, she had a mother who loved her. Maybe the rest of her life sucked, but she had that. I wouldn't be so quick to say that her life meant nothing.”

Lucy seems oblivious to the fact that for Bob, a mother’s love was wrested from him when he was a young boy, a boy who believed he was the cause.

Lucy, ever the writer, seems to be trying to make rational sense out of all these lives. And so do we. She gets no help from Olive or Bob. But then she does something surprising. Read “Tell Me Everything” to find out what.