Olive Kitteridge was published by Random House in 2008 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009, transforming Strout from a respected but little-known novelist into one of the most important American writers of her generation. The book is a novel-in-stories — thirteen interconnected narratives set in the fictional Maine coastal town of Crosby, all involving or observed by the title character — and its form is integral to its meaning. Olive appears in every story but is the protagonist of only some; in others she is a peripheral figure, glimpsed by other characters who may not realize how fully she understands their lives.
Olive Kitteridge is one of the great characters in contemporary American fiction. She is a retired seventh-grade math teacher — tall, heavy, sharp-tongued, prone to outbursts that embarrass her mild-mannered pharmacist husband Henry and alienate her son Christopher. She is impatient with stupidity, contemptuous of pretension, and capable of a cruelty that she does not always recognize. She is also, beneath the armor of her personality, desperately lonely, achingly aware of the passage of time, and possessed of an emotional intelligence that she cannot express because her New England upbringing has given her no language for tenderness.
The stories range widely across the community. “Pharmacy” traces Henry’s long marriage to Olive and his brief, unconsummated attraction to his assistant Denise. “The Piano Player” follows a cocktail pianist through an evening of performances for people whose inner lives are more turbulent than their composed exteriors suggest. “A Little Burst” shows Olive at her son’s wedding, barely containing her jealousy and grief. “Security” takes Olive to New York to visit Christopher and his new wife, where the gap between mother and son becomes an abyss.
Strout’s prose is remarkable for what it does not say. She works by indirection, by the accumulation of small, precise details — a gesture, a silence, a turn of phrase — that reveal character more completely than any amount of psychological analysis. The effect is novelistic (the stories build on each other, creating a portrait of a community over time) but also poetic (each story has the compression and emotional resonance of a lyric poem).
The book was adapted into a four-part HBO miniseries in 2014, with Frances McDormand as Olive — a performance of such ferocious empathy that it became the definitive interpretation of the character. A sequel, Olive, Again, followed in 2019.
Collecting Olive Kitteridge
First edition (Random House, New York, 2008): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Signed copies: $80–$250
- Later editions: $5–$10
The Pulitzer Prize and HBO adaptation have driven demand for first editions, which were printed in modest quantities before the book’s unexpected success.