EXCERPT Interrelated stories by the most acute observer of human behavior writing fiction today.
BOOK REVIEW: ELIZABETH STROUT’S LUMINOUSSHORT-STORY COLLECTION, ‘ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE’
BY CECILIA M. FORD, PH.D.
Elizabeth Strout’s astonishing new collection of short stories, Anything Is Possible, reconfirms her status as the most acute observer of human behavior writing fiction today. While each story about the local people who live in or around Amgash, Illinois, is a stand-alone gem, they are interrelated, much the way people in any community are in reality. We live our parallel lives, sometimes interacting, sometimes not at all, and then meeting up again later. Some characters central to later stories are introduced in an earlier one through town gossip and idle observations or recollections that people make to each other—as we all do, all the time.
Amgash is the hometown of the central character of Strout’s last novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, and she and her family also make appearances in this book. Lucy herself is a relative of Olive Kittredge, the main character of Strout’s eponymous book of linked stories, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. It was also made into an acclaimed HBO series starring Frances McDormand.
Like those two previous books, Anything Is Possible has the stunning clarity and simplicity of Shaker furniture or a Thomas Eakins portrait, crafted with honesty and a sure hand. Strout has the uncanny ability to describe a character in a few simple sentences. The people in her stories come to life both as unique individuals as well as men and women you will recognize from your own experience.
Talking of a bitter woman whose life has turned out differently than she thought it would, a neighbor explains, “people need to feel superior to someone.” About another, Strout writes, “Life had simply not been what she thought it would be. Shelly had taken life’s disappointments and turned them into a house.”
Lucy Barton is one of the only people to have fled this small but not especially intimate community. These are people who harbor secrets, memories that shame them or thoughts they don’t think others will understand.
With many of Strout’s characters, what’s unsaid is often as important as what is said. Lucy’s cousin, a kind man named Abel Blaine, is one of the few other characters that left Amgash and did well, leaving their childhood of bitter poverty behind and starting a successful business. Now a grandfather, he reflects silently on his long marriage:
“After many years of marriage things get said, scenes occur, and there is a cumulative effect as well. All this sped through Abel’s heart, that the tenderness between husband and wife had long been attenuating and that he might have to live the rest of his life without it.”
Though Abel and Lucy have escaped small-town life and their deprived childhoods, he is aware of “how much one forgot but then lived with anyway—like phantom limbs.” Strout is a writer who intuitively understands the complex nature of how the past stays with us and how its scars are constantly reasserting themselves. Another character, a woman named Annie, reflects that “her own experience over the years now spread like a piece of knitting in her lap with different colored yarns—some dark—all through it.”
These dark threads provide an undercurrent of vulnerability to Strout’s characters. Their tenuous hold on what they have overcome—some, like Lucy’s brother Pete, not all that well—is a constant shadow that hovers nearby.
But the residents of Amgash are plain people despite the secrets of the dark past. Abel’s sister, Dottie, who with him endured desperate poverty as a child, now runs a bed-and-breakfast. She is divorced, often lonely, but “Dottie was not a woman to complain, having been taught by her decent Aunt Edna one summer—it seemed like a hundred years ago, and practically was—that a complaining woman was like pushing dirt beneath the fingernails of God, and this was an image that Dottie had never been able to fully dislodge.”
Elizabeth Strout is a Maine native, and all her previous books have been set either there or in New York, where she spends half her time. Amgash residents are much like the Maine people Strout writes about, though: small-town people living lives limited by geography, obligation, and habit. Yet, as the title of this collection suggests, they are frequently surprised by the turns their paths take and the things they learn about themselves as a result.
Often the characters are revealed through interior monologues as they reflect on these surprising turns. A particularly moving story examines the regret an old woman feels about the pain she has caused her favorite daughter (now middle-aged herself) by moving to Italy and marrying a younger man, after she endured a harsh marriage much longer than she wanted to. Strout writes, “And she could not tell her daughter that had she known what she was doing to her, to her dearest little Angel, she might not have done it.
But this was life! And it was messy!”
Family secrets, with their attendant messes, abound. Pete Barton appears in a story in which he prepares for a rare visit from Lucy. In another, a neighbor, Tommy, drops by. He is an older man who had been the school custodian who had kindly let Lucy stay late at school so she could do her homework in the heated building—the Bartons had been so poor that they lived in an unheated garage. Tommy has long wondered about Pete and Lucy’s odd father, damaged by the War (World War II), assuming that he was responsible for the pain he sees in Pete. On this particular visit he has an insight as he watches Pete destroy a sign with a sledgehammer that Mrs. Barton had put up to advertise her small business as a seamstress. Tommy thinks, “Oh, it was the mother. She must have been the really dangerous one.”
Except for Lucy, who has become a well-known writer who lives in New York, the residents of Amgash live outwardly quiet lives but are filled with inner turmoil and conflict. Their stories are about the way average people attempt to cope with their bewilderment. About Tommy, Strout observes, “It seemed the older he grew—and he had grown old—the more he understood that he could not understand this confusing contest between good and evil, and that maybe people were not meant to understand things here on earth.”
Again and again, the people Strout writes about defy expectations—both theirs and others’. Dark secrets, hidden depth, and unexpected decency are woven throughout these elegant stories. “People surprise you,” one character observes. “Not just their kindness, but also their sudden ability to express things in the right way.” And Strout has the ability to portray the human condition with stunning clarity, expressed in just the right way. You will recognize these people, and yourself, in this book.
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Reviews with images
Characters you won't soon forget
Strout's novel, Anything is Possible, is masterfully done. She writes with an elegant economy; not one wasted word. The characters' stories are overlapping but each one is compelling and stands alone. I loved this book and it's people. They will stay with me for some time to come. I highly recommend it.
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