Some books were entertaining but slid right off the dinner plate of my attention and a few I did not like. Here are two novels—though not the only two—I thought were wonderful.
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
I loved Olive Kitteridge, but I loved this one more. Maybe that is because I am aging and Strout has tackled the challenge of writing about older people without sentimentality, but with realism, compassion, and wisdom.
An example: Out of the blue, Olive visits a much younger woman who is undergoing cancer treatment and fears death, but who also feels confused and guilty that she is becoming unkind to her husband, irritated and impatient. Olive shares about her own husband.
” ‘I don’t know,’ Olive said thoughtfully. ‘He may have been [sick before] and I just didn’t know it. He became very needy. And I wasn’t—I just wasn’t very nice to him. It’s something I think about a lot these days, and it bugs me like hell.’
. . . [and later in the same visit]
“You’re scared to die, even at your age?”
“Olive nodded. ‘Oh Godfrey, there were days I’d have liked to have been dead. But I’m still scared of dying.’ Then Olive said, ‘You know, Cindy, if you should be dying, if you do die, the truth is—we’re all just a few steps behind you. Twenty minutes behind you, and that’s the truth.’
“Cindy had not thought of that. She had thought that Tom, and her sons, and—people—that they would go on living forever and ever, without her. But Olive was right: They were all headed where she was going. If she was going.”
Of course it is Olive looking back sometimes, as well as forward, but that is Strout who recognizes how this tough, hard-edged “old bag” will continue her voyage. Again and again Olive’s choices and words felt personal to me. I laughed and cried and reread passages. There was one where someone confesses to Olive how weary she is at the idea of starting over and Olive basically says, “Oh, now, we never star over, we just go right on.”
As the first book, Olive is not always central to the narrative in these chapters which concern many people in the town. I read Olive Kitteridge when it was new and I feel fortunate to win an ARC of this follow-up. This in no way affects my review. I loved this novel. It’s one I want to read aloud to my husband, and that is a rare compliment.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
It was amazing.
I had it in hand for months, for a year even, sitting someplace in a stack of books to read, before I read it because I thought the cover was boring. Yeah, I know. Dumb, huh.
“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.”
My husband likes to share a Swedish saying: “There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.” That line is in this novel. No kidding. Most everything in this novel felt like that, like finding something I knew but mostly had not realized I knew.
For some, reading functions “as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterward feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.” Bits about people who are more interested in sounding like they know than about actually knowing . . . oh, yeah. Been there.
Rooney offers personal wisdom about relationships, about power differentials between people, about seeking popularity, about wanting to be liked, about fearing being known. And broader truths about class and about self-acceptance, about forgiveness and making a difference in the world. There is wisdom about leaving home, about writers and writing and readings, about dependence and strength.
I did not read any reviews until I’d made up my mind. A lot of people adore this book (I do) and not a few hated it. Maybe it came to those who “hated” it at the wrong point in their lives, maybe their life experiences have not run parallel to this story, maybe they just do not get it. I am sorry for whatever reason they did not read the novel I read.
This reader got it. This reader loved it. I did not cry, but I really should have because this is a powerful book about young people figuring things out, about those fraught years between teenager and full adult, about people accepting others and themselves, supporting and honoring responsibility. This is the age to beg forgiveness and grow up.
The main characters Connell and Marianne want to feel normal, a normal they can be proud of, a normal that is good, and a normal they are unsure even exists. They want to believe of themselves that they are good people. They fail along the way sometimes.
A couple of unfavorable reviewers said it was depressing and so I worried throughout the second half about what would happen at the end, about how it might devolve into apathy or cynicism. I rushed through too much too fast, and loved it even so. Two days and done and now I am so sad it’s over. NOT depressing, enlightening. What I read illuminates. It gives light.
There’s nothing more I could ask for.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 
I liked your line “slid off the dinner plate of my attention.”
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Olive, Again is on my shelf!
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I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. (btw I dragged my feet for the last pages because I feared the ending, but I should not have.)
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