The Elizabeth Strout Formula

Annie Berke considers adaptation, crossovers, and genre in her review of the novelist’s latest, “Tell Me Everything.”

By Annie BerkeNovember 7, 2024

• Fiction

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IN ELIZABETH STROUT’S newest novel, Tell Me Everything, Crosby, Maine, native Bob Burgess confesses he is desperately in love with his friend Lucy Barton. To this, his twin brother Jim replies, “I always remember reading—it was years ago now—an article in which a famous director said: There is nothing sexier than talking. […] And that’s what you and Lucy do—you talk.”

Elizabeth Strout’s writing is rarely described as sexy, punctuated as it is with flashes of trauma, poverty, and abuse, but her novels are undeniably intimate: she gets close. The worlds she has created, primarily in the fictional towns of Amgash, Illinois, and Maine’s Crosby (and the neighboring Shirley Falls), are populated by sensitive, observant characters who are anchored—sometimes mired—in the landscapes and communities that raised them. Her two best series, the Amgash (or Lucy Barton) books and the Olive duet, dovetail in Tell Me Everything. It is in this novel where Strout’s two most prominent leading ladies meet, and nearly all her characters, from Bob Burgess of 2013’s The Burgess Boys (later, 2022’s Lucy by the Sea) to Isabelle of Amy and Isabelle (1998), crop up in various guises. As Bojack Horseman’s Mr. Peanutbutter regularly cracks, in a formulation often invoked on Twitter: “What is this, a crossover episode?”

It’s funny because it’s strange. Literary fiction has dabbled in crossovers, but nowhere near as often as blockbuster franchises, comics, or genre fiction. Strout’s books consistently articulate bewilderment around and disapproval of mass culture; even theatrical performances are suspect. In Olive, Again (2019), the estrangement between a long-married couple is dramatized through their separate television sets. In Anything Is Possible (2017), a grandfather is confronted, Dickens-style, by the actor who plays Ebenezer Scrooge in the town’s annual production of A Christmas Carol. In both cases, the patriarchs are thrown by these adaptive forms and devices into literal shock, even life-threatening medical crises. No one keels over reading Proust, so let’s just say it’s not a ringing endorsement for the boob tube or even the hokey community playhouse.

Strout diplomatically referred to HBO’s 2014 adaptation of her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Olive Kitteridge (2008) as “its own thing,” a comment meant less as a criticism than an expression of how her sense of creative ownership fell away while watching. For their part, critics described it as mostly faithful, as well-received adaptations usually are. After all, the character of Olive, an aging schoolteacher who looms large but feels invisible, was born for the screen: blunt and argumentative, she’s a Frances McDormand type for whose portrayal McDormand won an Emmy. It’s easy to picture her, a tall, unshrinking woman in every sense—but this is also because Strout writes about her in a sharp, omniscient third person.

By contrast, Lucy Barton is less a character than a consciousness, mostly accessible through first-person narration—though, notably, this isn’t true in Tell Me Everything—or through others’ memories of her. Like Olive, Lucy sometimes feels invisible, even unlovable—a petite, soft-spoken writer trailed by her troubled childhood. Lucy’s life and art have made her, at times, too empathetic, forgiving to a fault. In Lucy by the Sea, she writes a story about a Trump supporter so tender and insightful that she is advised against publishing it for fear of being misunderstood by the masses. William, Lucy’s ex-husband, calls her a “spirit,” a description that feels at once doting and dismissive, a label that quietly wounds Lucy in its implied insubstantiality. Part of what makes her otherworldly, out of time, is her lack of pop culture literacy, the fact that she doesn’t want to watch or understand watching television. Though this lends her a certain romance, it is in fact the product of her growing up very poor—as her mother-in-law would say, her having “come from nothing.”

My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) was staged as a one-woman show starring Laura Linney, first in 2018 in London, and then two years later in New York. (Linney is even said to have inspired the trajectory of the Lucy/Amgash books, suggesting that infidelity be the cause of Lucy and William’s eventual divorce.) The reviews echo William’s sentiment, calling the production “crystalline,” the performance “translucent.”

As Helen Shaw noted for Vulture, however, adapting Lucy and her inner life to the stage was fundamentally flawed: “[P]rivate suspension and emotional reservation,” she wrote, “requires true quiet. (Books are conspiracies between the writer and the single reader.) Theater, on the other hand […] is existentially noisy.” Sometimes, it seems as though Strout and her cast of characters are put off by that very noisiness, the loudness of popular media and performance, in comparison with the quiet, contemplative practice of reading. Maybe something dangerous, even morally slippery, transpires in translation—something lost or willfully misunderstood.

Is it a matter of personal taste, then, or class-based taste hierarchies, that explains Strout and her fictional shadows? Sally Rooney recently told The New York Times that she was holding on to the rights for Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) because it was “just time to take a break from that and let the book be its own thing for a while.” It’s not quite the same as Strout saying that the Olive Kitteridge miniseries is, in fact, “its own thing”—but how different is it, really? Then again, the works of Strout and Rooney lie in closer proximity than those of Strout and Jonathan Franzen, who notoriously disdained the Oprah’s Book Club endorsement. Meanwhile, Oprah has picked both Olive, Again and now Tell Me Everything for her club, and Strout has responded in the most gushing of terms.

I mean, it’s not TV: it’s Oprah.

With Strout’s Tell Me Everything, the generic connections across media are more apparent, more forceful, than ever. It’s almost a concession in the literary world that Strout has created, as if she’s acknowledging that we must live alongside, or build our lives around, the forces and memories that otherwise threaten to overtake us. These might be cultural scripts, personal backstories, or generational inheritances. Many find different ways to cope (others do not).

For avid followers of Strout’s work, then, the initial question about Tell Me Everything is: what will it look like for these ladies to share the page, or stage? Will Olive eat Lucy alive with cutting remarks? Will Lucy absorb Olive into her nonjudgmental but all-consuming narration? Is there a fictional celebrity deathmatch on the horizon? And how do these women, their stories, add to what Strout has long been asserting through her characters, across books, within her ever-growing body of work?

Turns out, there’s a twist. More than one, in fact.

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Well, “twist” might be too strong a word. I’ll try again: there are two surprises. First, the story is really, mostly, about Bob, which—however unexpected for a book gabbed about as the ultimate Lucy-Olive crossover—is neither a secret nor a spoiler. Tell Me Everything opens with the line “This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time that we are speaking of him.”

The second surprise comes later: there’s a murder.

Strout’s novels often tackle themes of suicide or loss, and, in that respect, Tell Me Everything is no exception. But she rarely approaches the topic of murder or the genre of mystery. Add to it that Bob, a trained attorney, takes on the number-one suspect as his client: Matthew Beach, a mild-mannered, middle-aged oddball with a penchant for painting pregnant nudes. He stands accused of killing his horrible, aging mother, Gloria, and dumping her body in the quarry. Since Matt is her primary caretaker (his elder brother and sister having fled years earlier), the presumption is that eventually he snapped—in which case, as multiple characters ask, Who could blame him?

The steely Carol Hall, fresh off maternity leave from the attorney general’s office, is poised to arrest Matt. Not if Bob has anything to say about it, though. In the space of their few conversations, Bob transforms from a kind, perpetually conflicted Good Samaritan to someone else entirely. When Carol threatens him—“I bet I could bring him in right now and make it stick”—Bob comes back strong. “Carol, stop it. You don’t have probable cause,” he retorts, masking his growing anxiety. “You’re going to embarrass yourself if you think [what you have is] enough for probable cause. And I’m going to make sure it’s not even going to be allowed into evidence.” The latter line refers to the unsent letters Matt typed on his laptop, functional diary entries that spotlight his regular frustration and rage at Gloria’s shrewish behavior.

With lines like “They [the police] can watch him all they want. He’s not going anywhere,” Bob projects a confidence we know he does not feel. He channels a character from a legal drama and, with this act, drags the generic direction of the novel along with him. Strout is not a writer of procedurals; based on the rest of her work, it seems unlikely that her next book will adopt the key of John Grisham. She’s about as far from “just the facts, ma’am” as an artist can be. Every moment in her characters’ pasts is riddled with inconsistencies and varying subjectivities. It’s nearly impossible to get to the truth of anything, including the formative event in Bob’s own childhood that altered the course of his life and made him feel, justly or not, like a criminal.

What, then, is the murder of Gloria Beach doing here, in Strout’s already somewhat curious crossover episode—a causal crime tale with a beginning, middle, and end? What, to echo Lucy’s refrain throughout the novel, is “the point of this story” of Matthew Beach? Why this story, this mode, here, now?

The injection of a murder investigation into Tell Me Everything—the title capturing a sentiment that touches on both the novel’s interpersonal dynamics and its detective component—emphasizes what matters most to Strout. Elizabeth Strout doesn’t write procedurals, but she cares about processes; she is not one for institutions as such, but she is invested in how systems work and what it looks like when they break down.

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There’s still another mystery in the book, though not of the “ripped from the headlines” sort. It is the question of who is narrating Tell Me Everything. The “we” addressed throughout the book creates a sense of closeness between reader and speaker, but it doesn’t register as a chorus of voices—it’s more like an infinitely compassionate attorney speaking to a jury of one’s peers.

If there is a single running theme in this book, it is that of storytelling, the oral transmission of narrative and feeling that only exists in the telling. This cannot be adapted, acted out, or put on a screen. When Lucy and Olive meet, it is because the latter has stories to tell and wants the town’s foremost novelist to hear them. Their initial rapport is prickly at best, due in part to Olive’s inherent thorniness; almost immediately, she dismisses Lucy as “meek and mousy.” Ultimately, the women win each other over with similar tastes in their tales of others’ childhoods, others’ heartbreaks, others’ darkest secrets. These are stories which that back up onto the women’s own psyches, and they forge connection, despite Olive being an elderly lifer of small-town Maine and Lucy an interloper from New York City via Amgash, a woman quick to cry and quicker to fall in love.

Bob knows them both. Olive senses not just Lucy and Bob’s connection—also one of swapping stories—but that theirs exceeds the platonic as well. Bob and Lucy are, as one story shared between Olive and Lucy goes, the “ghost in the [respective] marriage” of each. Is it emotional cheating or a deep friendship that highlights the weaknesses in each’s relationship with their spouse? It’s a moral gray area, and a familiar one for Strout to plumb.

In Strout’s work, litigations never happen in the public square. They occur, rather, in people’s consciences, relationships, and narrated experiences. Strout’s language is shot through with the language of the law, of guilt and culpability. Lucy describes Bob as a “sin-eater,” someone who bears the burdens of others’ wrongdoings. Bob and Lucy’s relationship is, as the narrator describes it, “innocent, because both Bob and Lucy were—in a strange, indefinable way—innocent people.” The descriptor “innocent” feels strange here, as both characters have survived such difficult, traumatizing backgrounds. They know how cruel the world can be, but somehow, it hasn’t made them rotten or selfish; if anything, it has made them too tolerant of narcissists. And, seeing his son in a coma, Bob’s brother Jim believes that son to appear “the most innocent person who had ever lived in this world.” Again, Larry isn’t particularly innocent either, certainly not of Jim’s shortcomings as a husband and father, at least.

So what does the book even mean by innocence?

This is when Strout’s criminal plot becomes tremendously clarifying. Bob, looking at Matthew Beach, “saw immediately an innocent face, but he knew from experience that this was not a legal term. Without guile is what went through Bob’s mind.” The notion of without guile, meaning without fakeness or artifice, exposes the paradox at play with Strout’s storytelling: her work is carefully crafted, even as it is fundamentally suspicious of artful, generic performances of movies, television, and even the courtroom drama. Lucy and Olive are transfixed by the details of what they call “unrecorded lives”—“All these unrecorded lives, and people just live them,” Lucy muses—and so is Strout. But Strout’s job is to record, to transcribe, these (imagined, fictional) experiences. What does it look like to disavow authorial power, while acknowledging all the guile and plotting and gestural maneuvering that writing in fact is?

Perhaps that’s why we are never told the identity of the book’s speaker—not completely, anyway. Lucy gives Olive the story, this story, the story of Tell Me Everything, at the end. “That’s one hell of a story, Lucy,” Olive concedes. “You should write that down, you’ve written personal things before.”

“Never going to write it,” Lucy answers. “You are the receptacle.”

The narrative voice, with its emotive interjections, sounds like Lucy. Still, we have just as much reason to believe Olive is the author. And ultimately, any such investigation would be beside the point; stories only count, it seems for Strout, to the extent that they are passed along. What matters most of all is how these tales ripple through the generations, how the receptacles of stories become sources of shared knowledge, pain, and understanding.

The mystery of the narrator is the closest Strout can come to recording the unrecordable and, in a sense, erase herself as acclaimed author and Oprah guest and establish herself as a kind of sensitive, begrudging performer on the page.