I honestly don’t know how much I would have enjoyed Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything, if I hadn’t already been familiar with the major characters from her previous books. There’s cantankerous but big-hearted Olive Kitteridge of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel and also Olive, Again. Then we have novelist Lucy Barton of My Name Is Lucy Barton and Lucy by the Sea, and her ex-husband, William, of Oh William! with whom she is now living, and Jim and Bob Burgess of The Burgess Boys. Like Anthony Trollope with his Barsetshire novels, Strout has created a small and vivid world where familiar people come and go, and the longer we hang around her chronicles of the fictional towns of coastal Crosby and inland Shirley Falls, Maine — with New York City in a supporting role — the more we are expected to have some familiarity with its denizens. That’s not to say Strout doesn’t give us clues about who’s who in her new book, but it is probably not the best place to start for those just entering her oeuvre.
The hero of Tell Me Everything is sweet and unselfish Bob Burgess. A semi-retired criminal defense attorney, his main occupation for the first part of the novel is mooning over Lucy Barton. The two take weekly walks together, and when Bob isn’t admiring everything about Lucy while they chat and he sneaks a surreptitious cigarette (Bob’s wife, Margaret, is anti-smoking), he is remembering their conversations and longing for the next one to take place.
The book’s title alludes to a scene in which Lucy sees Bob after a longish interval apart: “Tell me everything,” she says. “Tell me every single thing. And don’t leave anything out.” This turns out to be a pretty good description of Strout’s narrative strategy. We hear about matters as trivial as the progress of Lucy’s houseplant, Little Annie, and as serious as the alcoholism of Bob’s ex-wife, Pam. Occasionally, the omniscient narrator even offers us advice on how to respond to the action: “Oh, poor Pam! Seriously, you should feel sorry for her.”
Still, it takes nearly a hundred pages before we are confronted with something that might be called truly momentous — a murder and later a suicide. Bob takes on the suspected murderer as a client, and if up until that point he has seemed like the nicest, most generous person we have ever met, he becomes positively saintlike as he shepherds unworldly Matt Beach into the 21st century. (“You can play games on a cell phone!” an astonished Matt tells Bob.)
Yet if my summary so far makes the novel sound like a bit of a rambling, shambling mess, it doesn’t read that way at all. Strout is too good a writer, and she knows her characters and their environment so well, that everything seems to add up in the end. Sure, Olive, one of the great characters in American fiction, is given short shrift; mostly she just trades stories about other people with Lucy. And I still found Jim — who, as a child, laid the blame for their father’s death on his 4-year-old brother — to be a real jerk, despite Strout’s efforts to show him in a more positive light. But these people are family to me now, with all of a family’s faults, complexities, and quirks, and I can’t wait to find out what they will be up to next.
This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books.
