Most people know I grew up in Kansas, and although Wichita is not a particularly small town, it sometimes felt that way. Family trips up to Ipswich, MA to see my cousins, or summer vacations to Santa Fe, Colorado or Italy confirmed to me that the world was bigger and I needed to see it. I couldn't imagine why everyone didn't want to leave. I moved to Boston after graduation and hardly looked back. I thought reading Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout reminded me of the insularity I sometimes felt growing up.
Olive is the main character connecting a dozen or so stories set in small town Maine. She's a curmudgeon, large and unattractive, overbearing and overall mean. In short, not a sympathetic character. The people in her town are gossips and un-motivated. Her son manages to escape first to California, and then to New York. The other men in the book seem broken and the women seem to get by mostly by being crazy and/or drunk.
It's been more (ahem) than 10 years I've lived in Boston and I can recall Wichita fondly. I'm happy to still have close friends I grew up with; some moved away, and some stayed there. But they're happy and successful. I'm better able to connect with fellow midwestern ex-pats and appreciate that friendliness. And I've come to realize that New Englanders are just as insular, if not more, than midwesterners. The discomfort I felt reading Olive Kitteridge came from my own feeling of being sucked in to Boston.
Ms. Strout is a wonderful writer. Her scenes and characters are evocative to a fault. So it's not the writing, but the subject matter. Last spring I met a woman in my neighborhood and upon telling her that we like to recruit a geographically diverse housestaff to my hospital, her response, "But why would that matter?" seemed to summarize my overall frustration with Olive Kitteridge.
Netflix stars: 3/5.
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