Seeing Impassively: Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again
by Will Walton
In the video for Jenny Hval’s song “Accident,” an older pregnant woman—perhaps she is in her seventies—spreads her legs and shoots a ray of light from her vagina, meanwhile lactating down the front of her dress. It’s extraordinary. The clip, part of a non-normative world that will look at older bodies, directed by Zia Anger, paints a portrait of womanhood and selfhood that’s fully integrated—much like Alice Neel’s Self-Portrait, and unlike so much popular art.
This October, Random House released Elizabeth Strout’s long-awaited Olive, Again, the sequel to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge (Random House 2008), and I thank “Godfrey!” for it. (The expression “Godfrey,” one of Olive Kitteridge’s catchphrases, arrives in place of taking the Lord’s name in vain.) Olive is back!
But Olive, and other residents of the (fictional) coastal town of Crosby, Maine, look at things a little differently now—ever “since that horrible orange-haired man” got elected. Xenophobic, homophobic, and racist bigotry; #MeToo; the opioid epidemic—the weight of these subjects is felt over the course of Olive, Again’s thirteen unique chapters. Strout mines the regional, historical conscious of her setting, as though to say, This is Olive’s world, and it has been her world. (Strout didn’t return on holiday.) In a chapter called “Heart,” a home healthcare aide pulls up to Olive’s house with a Trump sticker on her bumper. In another called “Poet,” Olive’s privilege as a white, middle-class lady shows up to stare her in the face. The chapter entitled “Arrested” deftly unpacks the most alarming side of the male ego trip. And “Labor” offers a sharp critique of misogyny—particularly Olive’s own.
Set at a baby shower, “Labor” posits Olive, who “didn’t like women,” at a baby shower.
“. . . it seemed that every person . . . had a story to tell about breastfeeding. Olive had certainly not breastfed Christopher—back then, no one did, except people who thought they were superior.”
This moment reveals more about Olive’s attitude toward bodies (and snobs), perhaps, than breastfeeding. But breastfeeding comes up again in one very lonely chapter called “Motherless Child,” in which Olive observes her daughter-in-law’s “large and dark nipple,” as the woman breastfeeds Olive’s grandchild. As a queer person, I relate to Olive on the grounds that sometimes I don’t feel at home in my body; motherhood—in particular, its bodily aspects—isolates Olive from her body, which, in turn, isolates her from other women, who presumably feel more at home in theirs.
For me, the unfettered queer spirit of Olive Kitteridge exists in Jane Anderson’s jig down the aisle at the Emmys, when Anderson, a queer woman, had just won the award for Best Writing for a Limited Series, for her adaptation of Olive Kitteridge, which airs on HBO.
I believe that, for the mini-series, Anderson, together with director Lisa Choldenko (The Kids Are All Right) and Frances McDormand, who produced the series and played Olive, wanted to give Olive Kitteridge her body back. I remember being so surprised—and thrilled—that the series contained a sex scene, during which Olive is laughing, so visibly pleasured by her husband. (There is a sex scene in the novel Olive Kitteridge too, but it goes: “‘Goodness,’ Olive said, when he moved off her.”) Crosby, Mainers often note Olive’s size—she is a big, tall woman. In the sequel, a man refers to kissing her as “kissing a barnacle.” Olive takes great pleasure in food (I ate a lobster roll in her honor while writing this review), and there is a transcendent moment—in the chapter “Pedicure”—when she recalls the pleasure of receiving a foot massage.
Over the course of Olive, Again, Olive ages, her body becoming more suspect to her. Physically, she shrinks—“‘Shrink?’” she tells a former student. “‘Of course you do. Your spine gets crunched up, your belly pops out—and down you go.’” She experiences anxiety and depression. Soiled bedsheets occur. Adult diapers are bought and worn. Accidents happen. All the while, it seems Strout, too, wants to give Olive her body back.
A singular moment arrives after Olive has been hospitalized, lately constipated from antibiotics she’s been administered. It reads as follows:
“. . . oh ye gods! Olive broke wind, and broke it some more, and then she
began to leak from her back end.”
I laughed and laughed, and importantly, I did not laugh at Olive (I wouldn’t have, but the point is that I couldn’t have). This scene doesn’t play for laughs that way, and here’s how: for a stretch, the narrator adopts Olive’s speech—“oh ye gods!”—aligning me with her, inviting me to imagine her talking, already telling a friend about this rapturous, however embarrassing, event. (And a friend does come, in the novel’s extraordinary final chapter, “Friend.”)
While reading the final few chapters of Olive, Again, I repeatedly thought of the character Prior in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America. Prior, AIDS-stricken, suddenly all-too-familiar with the all-too-realness of bodies, makes an accusation against his former lover, who, Prior says, “can’t handle bodies.” Strout can handle bodies: among them, an older woman’s—that is, Olive’s body. Seeing Olive’s body, the author never belittles, nor excises from it, its truth—which she might have done, had she been too polite about the whole thing.
To see impassively is an act of love. I feel it, too. And I love this book.