Review: Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
Strout’s tenth book, which brings together protagonists from earlier books, features, unusually for the author’s fictional universe, a murder mystery
Elizabeth Strout is perhaps one of the few writers who can effectively map pain and suffering in interpersonal relationships. In a career spanning three decades, she has created a fictional universe across her novels. Her tenth book, Tell Me Everything, sees protagonists from Olive Kitteridge (2008), The Burgess Boys (2013) and My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) coming together in a pronounced manner.
Back at Crosby, Maine, where Lucy By The Sea (2022) had left off, we find Lucy Barton settled with William. She is friends with Bob Burgess. They go for long walks where he gets to smoke a cigarette secretly from his wife. Lucy has begun to visit Olive Kitteridge more often. At 90, Olive has tons to talk about. They exchange stories and search for ‘the point of it’ in every conversation they have. But the town is brewing its own set of conflicts, as is common to Strout novels, where the protagonists are not the only characters who steer the plot. An old woman goes missing and is later found dead in a quarry. Her son is the prime suspect and Bob decides to act as his lawyer.
How Strout changes the texture of her story while retaining its essence is both admirable and surprising. Readers might go in expecting Lucy Barton to be their host as has been the case since the last four books in the Amgash novels series. However, from the outset, Strout tells her reader, ‘This is the story of Bob Burgess’. And Bob becomes the central figure. Still disturbed by his childhood memories, he is now letting go as life has different blows to offer. Strout has chalked him out with precision. Lucy labels him a ‘sin-eater’: feasting on the sins of others so they don’t feel burdened by them. Not for a second is the reader bored of reading about Bob’s sin-eating life. Rather, through the incidents that carry the story forward, Bob is rediscovered all over again. The same Bob who always ‘has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself.’
What is certainly different in this book is that, unlike Strout’s other novels, here we have a murder mystery. The death of the old woman has alerted the town and everyone has their own interpretation of what happened. The woman was infamously known as ‘Bitch Ball’ by kids at the school when she was a canteen worker. They hated her because she was a bully. Decades later, she is found dead with the evidence pointing to her depressed son who paints nudes of pregnant women. The plot engages the reader in a game of solving the mystery. Having become acquainted with the town over the course of Strout’s books, the reader now feels like a resident themselves, one who is aware of the townspeople.
Love plays a key role. At one point, Lucy says, ‘Love is love.’ And it is here, it is this sacred aspect that Strout wishes to drive home: love isn’t always romantic/sexual love. The relation between Bob and Lucy is one that’s rarely been written or spoken about. They love their walks and regard theirs as the most special friendship of their sixties. But Olive saw Bob’s face and understood that both were ‘in love’. Their story continues in the trajectory envisioned by Olive but takes its own twists and turns to show how two potential lovers can be together while still being married to their respective partners. While this relationship reveals Bob, it also shows a side of Lucy Barton that the reader may not have expected in the Lucy they knew, who was pitiable and docile.
While the novel is astute in its observation of different human conditions, its assessment of narcissistic and self-absorbed people in the characters of Margaret and William especially stand out. It falters, however, when Strout, through Bob, tries to explain that people commit evil acts because they have had a broken childhood and that this does not make them evil, as such. This sequence to explain why a mother was silent when her daughter was physically abused by her father and a friend because of the mother’s own childhood does not ring true. The world was shocked by Alice Munro’s daughter Andrea Skinner’s revelation that she was abused by her stepfather. No brokenness, or brilliant books can justify being complicit in a crime through silence. The religious tone that enters the novel toward the end diminishes its initial charm. Another interesting author, Sally Rooney has done a fantastic job of weaving Christianity into the lives of her characters to understand them in Intermezzo. Perhaps she doesn’t believe in the inherent goodness of people as Strout does. Rooney takes a broader view of the person’s socio-economic position while Strout scratches continuously at the distinct idea of human morality and conscience as intrinsic to their being because God bestows it.
Those who have read Strout before and have been strong admirers of her craft will now feel an exhaustion crawling toward them. Pursuing the same set of characters is a challenge and the author has already been successful with her nine books! Now, her ardent readers might want to see some new characters with newer stories even if they are on human suffering and pain. Her themes of child sexual abuse and coming from poverty and childhood trauma as explanations for the adults’ present brokenness have become repetitive. Perhaps, it is time to see Lucy Barton write a novel of her own so we see what all the suffering and listening to people has done to her imagination.
Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata as a Junior Research Fellow. He writes about book at Instagram (@fook_bood) and X (@rahulzsing).