Ever since Elizabeth Strout’s first novel, Amy and Isabelle (1998), introduced us to the imaginary New England town of Shirley Falls, she has developed a grippingly cohesive fictional landscape that gets richer with every book. The lives of ordinary people in ordinary places are Strout’s speciality. Her debut featured an emotionally wounded single mother and her equally wounded daughter, while in Olive Kitteridge (2008) and Olive, Again (2019) we became acquainted with the cantankerous schoolteacher Olive and her longsuffering husband Henry in nearby Crosby. The Burgess Boys (2013) returned to Shirley Falls with the story of legal aid attorney Bob, his more successful corporate lawyer brother Jim, and their fraught relationship. My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), meanwhile, launched the parallel account, presented as a memoir, of the New-York based writer Lucy, a survivor, barely, of an impoverished and abusive post-second world war childhood in Illinois. The Barton family history was explored from different angles in a volume of linked stories, Anything Is Possible (2017), and in the Booker-shortlisted novel Oh William! (2021), where we learned more about Lucy’s failed first marriage to the microbiologist William Gerhardt.
These worlds finally converged in Lucy By the Sea (2022), a pandemic novel that brought Lucy’s memoir-writing up to date in real time. The outbreak of Covid saw Lucy and her ex-husband, William, renting a house together in Crosby in order to escape locked-down New York. In Tell Me Everything they are now permanently settled there and are on the point of remarrying. The central pillar in this configuration is Bob Burgess, who happens to be William’s solicitor and who was responsible for introducing him and Lucy to the community. We are told at the outset that this is Bob’s story – the story of an apparently unexceptional 65-year-old man, who “would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.”
That this is Bob’s story is both true and not true. In Tell Me Everything’s interlocking narratives, one tap can set the entire structure trembling. Bob’s ex-wife Pam, we discover, once had an affair with the self-absorbed William (who talks mostly about parasites and potatoes) in New York. Olive’s best friend in the Crosby retirement community where she now resides at the age of 90 is the gentle, damaged Isabelle from Strout’s first novel. And Lucy herself is an avid mapper of such human intersections. It’s of course Lucy, rather than Bob, who is the key to the whole, because Lucy is a writer. She is “in a strange, indefinable way” a deeply innocent person, a consumer of life rather than someone who lives it. Bob’s second wife calls Lucy “childlike … She’s an artist, that’s how they are.” When sour and outspoken Olive – the opposite of the ideal reader – first meets Lucy, she is disappointed at how “meek-and-mousy-looking” she is, because she is unable to spot Lucy’s negative capability, which is simply the necessary self-effacement of the writer.
Olive has a story to tell, but like Bob, she doesn’t know if it’s worth telling. “Well, tell me anyway,” Lucy says. And we’re off. The novel presents us with stories that are, on the face of it, terrifyingly banal, about parental cruelty and filial guilt and intimate betrayal and roads not taken. Perhaps most disturbing of all is the story of the Burgess brothers themselves: as a child, Bob “had been playing with the gearshift of the family car and it had rolled down the hill of the Burgesses’ driveway”, killing Bob’s father. As a grown man, Jim, who was also in the car, confesses that it was he and not Bob who was responsible for the accident. Their relationship survives this late-life revelation, but when Jim eventually tells the truth to his son, Larry, the latter is so appalled that it creates a potentially permanent rift between them. “All these unrecorded lives,” Lucy marvels, “and people just live them.”
So far this is reassuringly familiar territory to fans of Strout’s fiction. And then it all becomes subtly strange. Interleaved with these tales of ordinarily damaged families is a genuine murder mystery: the story of Gloria Beach of Shirley Falls, whose body is found dumped in a nearby quarry. The chief suspect is her son, a solitary, childlike artist whose shyness might just conceal something worse. Bob is persuaded to take on the case precisely because “he had for most of his life thought he had killed his father, and this man had perhaps killed his mother”. Strout understands all too well that there are tears at the heart of things; that none of us will escape untouched. What is the point of these stories? “People,” Lucy says. “People and the lives they lead. That’s the point.”
“Tell me everything” is a credo of sorts, a statement of the writer’s voracious need to know, to solve the human case. But that Strout’s oblique approach to matters of the heart works so well is partly due to her judicious use of silence and omission to suggest the complexity of our closest connections. After Bob tries to act as the middleman in repairing Jim’s relationship with his son, Larry writes Jim a letter: “He unfolded the letter that was inside the envelope, and Bob put on his glasses and read ‘Dear Dad,’ and then the page was empty except for at the bottom where it was signed, ‘Love, Larry.’”
Sometimes, in this taciturn but deeply felt and profoundly intelligent novel, a kindly blank page is as good as it gets. Tell me everything. Or tell me nothing.
• Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout is published by Viking (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
