“I’m more of an Olive person than a Lucy person,” an editor once told me. If you know, you know. While the superhero fans hyperventilate over the latest blockbuster crossover—this summer, I gather, it was Deadpool & Wolverine—for a select few, the most fateful and long-anticipated meetup between two icons will be taking place this fall in the Elizabeth Strout Extended Universe. Granted, that universe mostly consists of a small New England town, but Strout can fit more believably human behavior and piercing drama into the sleepy streets of Crosby, Maine, than most comic book creators can squeeze into the entire galaxy.
And, finally, we don’t have to pick between Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton, main characters who have been appearing in Strout’s novels since 2008 (Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize) and 2016 (My Name is Lucy Barton, No. 1 New York Times bestseller). In her previous book, Lucy By the Sea, Strout set up a possible meeting between the flinty retired math teacher and the sensitive literary novelist when she had Lucy and her ex-husband, William, repair to a house in Crosby to wait out the pandemic. Crosby is, of course, Olive’s home, so we die-hards knew it was only a matter of time.
When that meeting finally arrives, not too far into Strout’s new novel, Tell Me Everything, it’s delivered in a modest, almost offhand manner. The plainspoken Strout was never going to make a big deal of the meeting, no matter how momentous it might be for her fans. But she does give us something startling in this new novel: Lucy Barton as perceived from the outside. While the Olive novels are told in the third person, Strout’s Lucy novels have always been narrated by Lucy herself, so seeing how she appears to others, especially the gimlet-eyed Olive, is new. One of the things Olive notices that we’ve never known about: Lucy’s mismatched socks, an endearing sign of her dottiness.
Longtime Strout fans will gather that there’s a bit of Strout in both Olive (who, like Strout, grew up in Maine) and Lucy (who, like Strout, became a successful novelist and lived in New York for decades). When the two women meet in the retirement village where Olive lives, it’s at Olive’s request. Having heard about Lucy and read some of her books, Olive decides that she’s finally found someone to whom she can dispense her wealth of stories, so she asks their mutual friend Bob Burgess to send her over. In a sense, their meetings become a conversation between very different aspects of the same person.
Lucy flutters and flaps in every emotional breeze. The briefest encounters make indelible impressions on her. No-nonsense Olive has little use for polite niceties. The second time they meet, Lucy greets Olive with an earnest, “How have you been?” “Who cares,” Olive replies with a flap of her hand, a statement so categorical it doesn’t even rate a question mark. “Now,” Olive goes on, “as I told you on the phone, I have another story to tell you.”
That’s where Strout’s two heroines—Strout’s two aspects—so satisfyingly bond. Each is a kind of detective, fascinated by the clues to what Lucy calls the “unrecorded lives” of the people around them. Olive’s first story has to do with her own mother, a poor farmer’s daughter who fell in love with the son of a rich Boston family in her teens. The boy’s family separated the pair. Both married other people and never saw each other again. Only much later, after her mother’s death, did Olive find a news clipping in one of her mother’s books mentioning this man and his family. His two children had been given the same names that her mother gave Olive and her sister. Olive considers this story “interesting,” but only as Lucy elaborates on this detail, deducing that the young lovers had picked out these names together long ago and that their spouses never knew that the names represented a lost love, does Olive also admit that it’s also a sad story. Olive’s shrewdness and Lucy’s empathic imagination find themselves in perfect harmony.
Olive doesn’t always vibe with Lucy’s flights of fancy. Lucy tells her new friend a story about sitting next to a man on the quiet car of a train and, despite having almost no conversation with him, deciding that she “loved” him and that they were in fact sharing with each other their rapturous response to the passing scenery. Olive, along with perhaps more than a few readers, finds this baffling, but the occasional overflow of fancy is part of the Lucy Barton package, a trait that “Lucy people” have come to cherish. The world is richer with her in it.
Despite their seemingly opposite temperaments, Lucy and Olive are linked by their creator’s curiosity and the stories she spins out of it. If one of them occasionally wonders what “the point” of any of those stories is, the other is there to remind her:
“People,” Lucy said quietly, leaning back. “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.”
“Exactly,” Olive nodded.
