There is much debate among readers concerning Olive’s bristly personality – whether she’s gruff, maddening, loveable, sympathetic, or “blunt, flawed and fascinating.” One reviewer stated “Strout makes a reader feel protective, even tender, toward Olive…” but I could not disagree more. I found her to be heart breakingly mean-spirited, as she is in this scene with her husband, Henry:
It was Henry who bought the groceries now. One day he brought back with him a bunch of flowers. “For my wife,” he said, handing them to her. They were the saddest damn things. Daisies dyed blue among the white and ludicrously pink ones, some of them half-dead.
“Put them in that pot,” Olive said, pointing to an old blue vase. The flowers sat there on the wooden table in the kitchen. Henry came and put his arms around her; it was early autumn and chilly, and his woolen shirt smelled faintly of wood chips and mustiness. She stood, waiting for the hug to end. Then she went outside and planted her tulip bulbs.
I could cry, reading that.
In an interview with Robert Birnbaum, Elizabeth Strout says she doesn’t have a stake in readers’ reactions to Olive, but that she does have a stake in their reactions to the book. “I hope that even if they have a negative response to much of Olive’s behavior, they are maybe still drawn into this humanity that is underneath all of her actions.”
But it is difficult to find humanity in a woman who is cruel to her family, friends, and those in her community. Her favorite word seems to be “stupid,” as in “you are stupid, they are stupid, he/she/it is stupid.” So I do not commiserate when sad things happen to her, or when she at last realizes the value of what she has so consistently and cruelly dismissed. (In other words, lady, what goes around, comes around.)
Having said that, I don’t need a soft and fuzzy protagonist to appreciate a finely crafted novel. The writing is delicious, and all of the characters supremely drawn. Which, despite cranky old Olive, is to Elizabeth Strout’s credit.
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