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It’s not easy to find the “perfect” book for a book discussion group, but Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout may be the gold standard. It’s short, only 270 pages. It’s written in a style that makes it easy to pick up and put down. It has enough characters to keep readers interested and plenty of stories that hook readers and leave them asking, “but what happened next?”

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Elizabeth Strout, gathered many previously published short stories and pulled them into a novel that perfectly captures what it means to be Everywoman.

Recently readers gathered at the Kansas City Public Library discuss Olive Kitteridge and all were fascinated with this irascible, perceptive, brutally honest, and surprisingly sympathetic woman. There many topics to discuss and not all of them involved the title character.

One reader noted that at first reading, it was hard to keep on track with this book. It seemed to jump around. She pointed particularly to the short story, “A Different Road” which moved abruptly back and forth in time from Olive’s perspective and drew connections between two vastly different situations.

A few readers mentioned the great number of characters and while it wasn’t difficult to keep them straight in each individual story, it was sometimes difficult to remember that a character had appeared in a previous story in a completely different light and all had some tether to Olive. One reader called Olive, “A cold blast of truth” in the lives of all the community members who came in contact with her.

One participant asked the group if it made a difference that the reader never learns the outcome of some of the situations presented in the stories. “There’s no closure for some of the characters. The reader is a fly on the wall in a little town that gets to hear all the juicy gossip. Does it matter if we don’t find out what happens to these people?”

The themes of marriage and death made for great conversation. One reader felt there was an underlying sense of despair and desperation in the novel and remarked on the recurring themes of aging and death. Another loved the different portrayals of marriage in the stories and the group took some time to explore what it is that kept these couples together, especially if it was obvious they would be happier living apart.

Lest potential readers think this is a depressing, dreary book, the attendees closed out the discussion by reading aloud their favorite jokes from Olive Kitteridge. The parrot that disdained blasphemy was the hands down favorite along with the doctor jokes.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Adult Books, Fiction, Good Books for Book Clubs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.