motherhood – Great books blog

Page turner: 6/10
Heart tugger: 7/10
Thought provoker: 7/10
**Well crafted: 10/10**
Overall: 4 stars

**Making a special appearance for this book, is the ‘well crafted’ rating. When I originally decided on the different parts of the rating system I took the assumption that all of these books would be at least moderately well written and conceived. And a fifth means of rating a book seemed like a lot. But this book is so very much in a league of its own, I have temporarily introduced the metric so that everyone knows how much it excels. (The temporary rating is very clever colleague’s idea. Thank you.)**

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. It really is the ‘American’ type of book that the Pulitzer Prize is looking for. Set in a small town on the coast of Maine in the years post 9/11, it resonates with all that is small-town Americana. But I think (hope) it would make it all the more appealing for an international audience as well.

Olive Kitteridge is the title and the central character of this story of the quietly intertwining lives of a town’s inhabitants. She is irritable, brooding, loving, passionate, and silent. She is the lynch pin of the book, tying together the narration as each chapter shifts to focus on the stories of other people’s lives. The execution is flawless. The story is tight – characters are never forgotten, or left hanging, or not somehow contributing to the progression of the novel. Whereas I often think of all of these pieces of fiction as books or stories, Strout has written a stunning novel.

A quick example: one of the characters describes her father having ‘sole custody’ of her. And for years she thought it was spelled with a u.

To the point. Pointed. But not labored or cocky.

There is little else I can say about this fantastic book. Read it. It is a book about the vastness of love, and anger, and death. Olive certainly feels these intensely. The book has a quietness about it – but the characters’ lives are not at all plodding or quaint. So it is a suppose about ‘quiet lives’ but makes the point that no life is quiet.

I do warn you of one thing: I read this a few years ago and remember not liking it all that much. I wasn’t hugely enthused about re-reading it. My turn-around, I hope, speaks in favor of the book. That said, for me it has very much been a book that displays is greatness through its prose and its craft. Don’t read it just to ‘see what happens next’. Read every word and let it sink in.

Page turner: 5/10
Heart tugger: 5/10
Thought provoker: 6/10
Overall: 3 stars

His Family, by Ernest Poole, was published in 1918 and was the first book to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I had never heard of it, and honestly I didn’t know what to expect, but I was intrigued to see what that first book, from that era of American history, was going to be about. So, in the age old tradition of saying cliches are bad but then doing precisely what they say – I judged the book by its cover.

My copy of His Family is a paperback, and the cover is mostly black and glossy. It is nearly perfectly square and unusually large at probably 7 by 7 inches. It’s not that thick (277 pages) and the font is a pretty good size. On the cover, the title is in white and there is a white rectangle cut-out that shows a sketchy drawing of a man (60ish-years-old) sitting at a dining table with a family, colored in with pastels. To my mind, all of this confirmed my prejudgment to think the book might be a bit antiquated, but looked quite sweet. Maybe a bit story-book-ish? Maybe just plain and unadorned.

The first few chapters only furthered my modern-prejudiced view. The book starts off quietly. The world it depicts is small: a 60ish year old man named Roger Gale (as depicted on the cover) is in fact a widower living in Manhattan, with 3 grown daughters and 4 grandchildren by the eldest. The younger two (aged 27 and 30 or so) are unmarried. And it takes place over a few years, around about 1913-1915. The writing is straightforward, and whilst I wasn’t particularly sucked into their lives I thought it was pleasant, even if I was a bit frustrated by Roger’s self-admitted distance from his bustling family of a mother, a debutante, and a teacher. I thought it might be an apt portrait of family life at that time. And it is. But I wrongfully misjudged what that should mean.

As the novel progresses, it deepens. Not nice (though not horrible) things happen to the family. And it very much takes on a Goldilocks and the Three Bears feel: where ‘Too big’, ‘Too small’, and ‘Just right’ are loosely equated to the three daughters being, ‘Too old-fashioned’, ‘Too fast and flippant’, and ‘forward thinking but respectful’. The parallels between their personal lives and the wider changes and growth of society is heavy handed, but intelligent and interesting.

The social commentary on the place of motherhood in women’s lives is blatantly the major theme. Nearly a century after the book was published the idea of the ‘modern mother’ – the balancing act that the author discusses – remains entirely relevant, if initially surprising. There is also a wider reflection on war and humanity and the book is a window into the mindset of Americans as it was feeling the pains of the First World War in Europe, but before the United States entered the conflict.

The book, also, has the surprisingly endearing feature of having the final two words of the book be, ‘…his family’. Which is a nice touch. Particularly if you read the first part of the sentence; but I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.

On reflection, the cover makes the book out to be more old-fashioned and simple than it is, though it definitely is not a book of great subtlety. I would not put it down as a forgotten classic because it can read what I think some might call ‘Dickens extra-light’. But I enjoyed it, and feel I have learned a lesson in so doing. I would recommend it to anyone who wonders what it might have been like to be born a hundred years earlier.