Elizabeth Strout, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge novels, is a rare thing: critically acclaimed and hugely successful commercially. In this, her 11th publication, Maine is left behind for a (so far) standalone novel focused on Artie Dam, a history teacher in Massachusetts Bay.
Strout has won a legion of admirers by creating a literary voice that is uniquely her own, but that draws upon timeless storytelling traditions. In essence, to read Strout is to experience an intimate conversation with a gripping storyteller who helps you to see the world anew. This great strength, a very powerful authorial voice, does however, begin to suggest a diminishing return here.
[ Elizabeth Strout: ‘It’s a deeply sad time in the US’Opens in new window ]
Most of the novel is told from Artie’s perspective, but occasionally Strout slips into omniscience, and sporadically offers some context for the reader in brackets. These authorial intrusions disrupt the narrative flow, irrespective of what good company Strout is. Even for a devotee, of which I am one, it jars.
Nevertheless, as fans of Strout will have come to expect, Artie is an ordinary man that contains multitudes. A man with a secret, whose life is capsized when he learns he is not the only one. Artie is amazed to discover that all people “held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe”. This is not a revelation for Strout, however, but rather the narrative thread that connects all her novels – she delights in spotlighting the beauty she observes in what others deem banal. The poor and the elderly, so often maligned or sidelined in literature, take centre-stage. Loneliness and shame are her specialist subjects.
