TELL ME EVERYTHING by Elizabeth Strout

Bob Burgess is the central character here, but the book is populated with lots of people in his orbit:  his wife Margaret, his ex-wife Pam, his brother Jim, his friend Olive Kitteridge, and his friend Lucy Barton.  All of these people have appeared in Strout’s other books, but one new character, Matt, is accused of murdering his mother.  Bob signs on as Matt’s defense attorney and firmly believes in Matt’s innocence.  Bob’s other problem is that he may be falling in love with Lucy, who describes Bob as a “sin-eater”—someone who absorbs other people’s failings.  In other words, Bob—a married man—is not the type to be committing sins of his own, like adultery.  The main action, if you want to call it that, may revolve around Bob, but the central theme seems to be unrecorded lives.  Lucy and Olive get together regularly to swap stories about themselves and others.  Some of these stories are significant, and some are not, and I have already forgotten most of them.  Therein lies the problem for me:  there are just too many stories.  I think a trend toward an amalgamation of vignettes is developing in literary fiction, and I’m not wild about it.  Fortunately, here Bob is the anchor that supplies the main artery of the book, but there are a lot of tributaries that drifted away from my consciousness all too fast.