OLIVE, AGAIN by Elizabeth Strout

The ever blunt and prickly Olive Kitteredge is back and in even better form this time around.  It is rare that I love a sequel more than the original, but that is certainly the case here.  Perhaps I was more prepared for the vignette style that Strout employs.  Olive is sometimes the main character and sometimes just appears as a cameo, but I also recognized beloved characters from The Burgess Boys and Amy and Isabelle in this novel.  What a treat!  Even better are the laugh-out-loud moments.  In the middle of some various serious dialog, such as one conversation about the sad and lonely lives of many nursing home residents, one of the characters will blurt out an outrageous and hilarious comment.  Several stories stand out as memorable, including one in which a teenage girl allows the man whose home she is cleaning to watch her fondle her own breasts, although such an act would at first seem reckless and perhaps even dangerous.  In another story, a woman confides in her beloved family lawyer about a marital indiscretion and grapples with whether or not to confess the affair to her husband.  In perhaps the most shocking story, a woman explains to her parents and sister that she earns money as a dominatrix.  Whoa.  Even more weird from my sheltered perspective is that her encounters do not include sex.  Ultimately, Olive is the hub to all of the spinning spokes of this novel.  She has met her match in Jack Kennison, a former Harvard professor, who just loves her “Oliveness.”  Here we have two souls with apparently little in common who find comfort in each other’s company late in life.  They do both, however, have uneasy relationships with their children.  Olive has never really liked her daughter-in-law but has to reevaluate her disapproval when she notices that the daughter-in-law treats Olive’s son in a similar condescending manner to the way in which Olive treated her son’s father.  The fact that her son may have chosen a wife whose personality resembles that of his mother is an eye-opener that may open the door to reconciliation between Olive and both her son and his wife.  Olive endures a brief stint in the hospital in which her son visits frequently and surreptitiously keeps track of her condition even more closely than she would ever have expected.