“Motherless Child”
by Elizabeth Strout
from the August 5 & 12, 2019 issue of The New Yorker
Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 book of linked stories, Olive Kitteridge, won the Pulitzer Prize. I remember really enjoying it, and looking back at my review (here) I see I liked it more than I remember. How nice to see that Strout is returning to that world: “Motherless Child” is a story about Olive and her son, Christopher, who was getting married in one memorable story in Olive Kitteridge. Here he is married and has some children of his own.
They were late.
Olive Kitteridge hated people who were late. A little after lunchtime, they had said, and Olive had the lunch things out, peanut butter and jelly for the two oldest kids, and tuna-fish sandwiches for her son, Christopher, and his wife, Ann. For the little ones, she had no idea. The baby was only six weeks old and wouldn’t be eating anything solid yet; Little Henry was over two, but what did two-year-olds eat? Olive couldn’t remember what Christopher had eaten when he was that age.
I like it. I remember Olive pretty well even after just that short opening. I’m glad we have this story and will soon have an entire books that takes us back to this complex person. Olive, Again is slated to hit shelves on October 15.
I haven’t had a chance this morning to do any more reading, but this is definitely a story I’ll be reading today. I’ll return to post my thoughts below. In the meantime, if you have any thoughts on “Motherless Child” or Oliver Kitteridge or Strout’s work in general.
I was waiting to see if Trevor would comment on this story before adding my comments, but we are at Friday now, so I’m going to jump in anyway. The mood of the story throughout is one of unrelenting awkward discomfort. None of the people come off as likable (with the possible exception of Jack, who we only meet very briefly) and spending time with them is much like what it is like for them to spend time together – a bit excruciating. Olive has a few moments of near-awareness, where she almost is able to accept that her son is as he is because of her poor parenting and that his choice of wife and the personalities of his kids are a direct reflection of that, but she continues to resist accepting that until the end where it looks like it might finally be sinking in only for her to seem to want to just put it all out of her mind again and be with Jack. Strout does a very good job of giving us a variety of characters none of which we like and whose interactions are characterized by unease, yet maintains engagement of the reader. That is no small or easy feat.
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I first heard of Olive Kitteridge in 2015 after the TV adaptation of it won a pile of Emmys, I started reading the book soon thereafter, but I did not enjoy it and quit after two or three stories. But I did check the Wikipedia brief plot summaries of the stories in that book while reading this new story and see that the beginning of Olive’s relationship with Jack, Christopher’s marriage to Ann and the ill-fated visit Olive pays them that she refers to in this story are covered in stories there. Strout does well to build on the previous continuity of Olive’s story without the reader here actually needing to know any of the details of the previous stories.
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I don’t feel strongly enough about this story to think I should try the first collection again or read more from the new collection, yet at the same time I think this is one of the best of the recent stories The New Yorker has published.
I am so excited for the arrival of Olive, Again.I assume this is a chapter from that novel, is that correct?
David, I can see why you find Olive unlikeable, but I like her. I even started to like Ann a little bit, when she told Christopher to stop being so childish.
Since the character of Olive is intended to be “tart” (I could hear my own mother’s voice occasionally), I permit myself the same. I listened to the reading of part of the story, and then read it. It seems conventional: it does it well, but the notion of a bad person, unaware of being bad, having a final epiphany, and then, maybe, shrugging it off with a car ride, well, it seemed not worth the read. One hint at deeper narrative and writing complexity was the nice ambiguity of who was the narcissist referred to when Olive overhears the conversation. She assumes herself, but it could easily have been Anne referring to her husband.
I really enjoyed this but what I’m trying to figure out is if I’m not reading it as a sequel to the wonderful HBO miniseries. While reading this, I could only see the sublime Frances McDormand and Bill Murray (even though his character only appears at the end of the miniseries and this story he is so good that his performance still resonates). Obviously, this is a sequel to her collection of stories but….
David —
You really have a way with words: “unrelenting awkward discomfort”. Exactly. While some could tolerate that, I couldn’t. No engagement for this reader. I stopped about half way through. This story is what TV reviewers call “cringeworthy”. I wouldn’t associate with a person like Olive in my real life, why should I do it in fiction?
William, there are all kinds of people I would never want to spend time with in real life who I can enjoy reading stories about. Horrible people can be quite interesting people as well. The one exception to that would be people I would put in the category of being annoying. Annoying people are just as annoying in fiction as they are in the real world, and so when an annoying person is the main character of a story, especially a story told in the first person where the character is talking directly to you, it can be a chore to read that story. Olive is a person I definitely don’t like, have little sympathy for, but I don’t find her annoying in a way that puts me off wanting to hear her story. I find it easy to understand why her son, as awful as he is in his own way, wants to spend as little time as possible with her. But I don’t feel like I’m in his position. Thankfully.
David —
Interesting distinction. I do find Olive annoying in a very offputting way.
Also, with regard to last week’s entry, by Salman Rushdie, you said you don’t read excerpts. This is an excerpt.
Also, I read the first “Olive” novel and as I remember I liked it. Why I find this piece so intolerable I don’t know.
William,
This isn’t an excerpt. It is a complete short story in a forthcoming book of short stories that are all about Olive, just as the previous book was. Even though the stories are connected and all about the same person, they each are written to be read as separate episodes, unlike a novel excerpt. As I mentioned in my original comment here, Strout introduces Olive’s relationship with Jack in one story in her previous book and another story is about Olive’s ill-fated trip to visit her son and his family that is mentioned in this story, but the reader for this story doesn’t need to know that because Strout designs each story to work independently of the others.
Got it.
There is a random sly snide little snippiness popping up in the dialogue of Elizabeth Strout’s “Motherless Child” as though family members don’t care if they make remarks that make their supposed loved ones or not as well known supposedly loved ones, uncomfortable.
In this case it seems to spring from sadness or small anger that people can carry around unexpressed that distances them from other people, even in their immediate family. Good writing often consists of well observed and described slice(s) of specific reality. And this story breezes along very smoothly.
The pay phone is a nice touch but the call probably cost 50 or 75 cents or 4 quarters or it was broken, neglected or abandoned or hadn’t been removed or disappeared somewhat like Olive.
I agree with David that it is one of the best written short stories to appear in The New Yorker recently. And William seems put off by the story as being to familiar or dysfunctionally pat sort of like bland cereal as opposed to really great tasting crunching granola with seeds and fruit bits or enjoying a really good dinner.
For myself it is a little too waspy Boston Brahmin upper middle class sterile though not so stiff as usual and reminds me of the worst qualities of our ruling elite. And motherless child is a kind of generic general idea. Still it is a smooth and well-written short story with not as much complexity or detail as we may have wanted but with good dialogue and good buildup to a logical conclusion.
As far as unlikeable characters who are annoying and unlikeable, I see many more of them in Washington, in politics, on TV, in films or on city streets. There seems to be a cultural bias that these are the self important people that (especially on TV news programs) we should be most interested in. And there is the idea that anyone anywhere likeable or easily tolerated wouldn’t stand a chance or wouldn’t survive in the current environment.
Luckily there are all sorts of people and we are not required to finished reading stories about characters that don’t interest us. I am not as much interested in the content of this story as I am in its structure, which seems almost flawless for a short story.
I think Elizabeth Strout’s creation of Oilve Kittredge is a masterpiece. I have loved Olive for her uniqueness and her verisimilude: she is a woman of a certain age who is still unsure of herself, who has recognizable strengths and weaknesses, who lives in a complex reality and who, above all, cannot ever, nohow, no way, connect comfortably to her adult child. In this story, I loved her exquisite happiness at being able to spend time alone with him and to revel in his talking to her. I sympathized completely with her unhappy distance from her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, and her wonderment at how she was unable to connect with them when other people seemingly had no trouble with family dynamics. Strout manages to hold in loving narrative suspension both Christoper’s bad behavior and Olive’s self-blame. They are inextricably related. I commend Elizabeth Strout forever for making Olive Kittredge a character of such dimensionality, of such love and such disappointment.
I like your take on this story, Madwomanintheattic. Olive is a character of much dimension. I came away from it feeling mixed emotions about her. She makes some glaring missteps (not enough chairs or food, showing favoritism to Henry), but she is genuinely affected that Ann’s mother has died. Olive is, if nothing else, pretty honest with herself and others. She’s a flawed and self-centered person, but in her own way, she is kind of an ideal mother-in-law for Ann. She is easy to dislike and she’s not a burden to her family. You could say her best points are in what she is not. I enjoyed this story and especially the complex character of Olive.
The interaction between Anne and Olive reminded me a lot of my own mil and myself (so obviously not a great relationship…). I was able to empathize with both sides, right up until the very end. When Christopher is acting like an ass and his wife finally calls him out on it and shows that it’s him who has been the ass all along, she and Jack go into this whole chat about her feeling sorry for him for being a baby and having to be scolded by his wife. How about we stop blaming the wife for everything and expect men to actually be responsible for the way they treat people!! I found the end of the story rather disgusting in the way Anne gets slapped with the blame no matter what. It’s the very reason we are no contact with my in laws now (among other things)