Elizabeth Strout, Part I, Studying Olive, Again

Nancy Zafris

I want to begin this post by acknowledging my dear friend and mentor, Nancy Zafris, whose death in August of last year left a hole in the heart of everyone whose life she touched -- and there were many.

At the Kenyon Writers Workshop Nancy taught us a concept she called, "plant, return, deepen." The idea is that beginning writers, and even experienced ones in early drafts, tend to dump all the exposition and backstory on the reader in one fell swoop, leaving the narrator -- and worse yet, the reader -- with nothing to do. Instead, the art is to plant a clue, a hint -- an image that will serve as a touchstone -- then return to it later, with a little addition - and then yet again to deepen its meaning. Novels such as To The Lighthouse and The Sound and the Fury not only use this technique, but are veritable embodiments of it.

Another thing Nancy shared with us was a grudge against the way some writers attempt to use scenery as a replacement for emotion. As fiction editor for the Kenyon Review, she was annoyed by endings where the protagonist looks out over a line of trees, or breaking waves, or whatever, as if that would fill in for an epiphany that the writer was too lazy or unskilled to provide.

When I think of writers who exemplify what Nancy taught us, Elizabeth Strout tops the list. Strout's most recent book is the New York Times Bestseller, Oh, William! but in this post, I'm looking at a passage from an earlier novel, Olive, Again, to explore how it employs setting in an epiphany as well as demonstrates the concept of "plant, return, deepen."

The chapters in Olive, Again function much like short stories. In the first chapter, "Arrested," Jack Kennison visits the Maine seaside:

Elizabeth Strout

Summer had opened itself, and while it was still chilly in mid-June, the sky was blue and the gulls were flying above the docks. There were people on the sidewalks, many were young people with kids or strollers, and they all seemed to be talking to one another. This fact impressed him. How easily they took this for granted, to be with one another, to be talking! No one seemed even to glance at him, and he realized what he had known before, only now it came to him differently: He was just an old man with a sloppy belly and not anyone worth noticing...

From the lyrical "Summer had opened itself," the description moves spatially from the blue sky with its seagulls down to the docks and sidewalks, and finally to the young people with their "kids or strollers" who "all seemed to be talking to one another." Here, Strout inserts Jack's surprising response: "This fact impressed him." She dwells just long enough on the physical setting to lead us naturally into Jack's consciousness. 

Had she started with the young people and their children talking naturally to one another instead of the sky and weather, the effect would have been more abrupt, instead of stealing up on us by degrees as it does, and indeed as it does on Jack himself. 

The first passage plants images and motifs -- "kids or strollers," "talking to one another," the "sloppy belly" and Jack's awareness that no one "even glances" at him and that he is not "worth noticing" -- which Strout returns to in the following passages:

A couple emerged from the door on one apartment; they were his age, the man also had a stomach, though not as big as Jack's, and the woman looked worried, but the way they were together made him think they had been married for years. "It's over now," he heard the woman say, and the man said something, and the woman said, "No, it's over." They walked past him (not noticing him) and when he turned to glance at them a moment later, he was surprised -- vaguely -- to see that the woman put her arm through the man's, as they walked down the wharf toward the small city...

.. Now he sauntered down one of the wharfs where condos were built, and he thought perhaps he should move here, water everywhere around him, and people too. He took from his pocket his cellphone, glanced at it, and returned it to his pocket. It was his daughter he wished to speak to.

After being "surprised - vaguely" at a couple's physical intimacy, and comparing his belly unfavorably with another man's (a return to the belly image from the earlier passage) Jack walks down a wharf, seemingly without purpose, though in reality, the story is nearing the crux.

Even before Jack puts the cellphone back in his pocket, we feel his hesitancy in the inverted syntax -- "He took from his pocket his cellphone" -- as if not wanting to admit what he's up to -- holding back the word "cellphone" until the last. Another inverted sentence follows, made even more awkward by passive voice -- "It was his daughter he wished to speak to" -- reflecting his own reluctance and awkwardness. The themes of  children, parents, communication and intimacy  return, and previous descriptive details turn out to be not incidental but integral. Always gratifying when there are no wasted motions.

What follows is the story proper, when Jack calls his estranged daughter. (Spoiler: it does not go well.) After the call ends, Strout returns briefly to the setting, using it reinforce theme and emotion instead of as a stand-in for them. Also, Strout calls back a final time, some of the images she has planted and returned to, this time deepening them.

... And that was that! That was that.

Jack sat on the bench a long time. People walked by, or perhaps no people walked by for a while, but he kept thinking of his wife Betsy, and he wanted to howl. He understood only this: that he deserved all of it. He deserved the fact that right now he wore a pad in his underwear because of prostrate surgery, he deserved it; he deserved his daughter not wanting to speak to him because for years he had not wanted to speak to her -- she was gay; she was a gay woman, and that still made a small wave of uneasiness move through him. Betsy, though, did not deserve to be dead. He deserved to be dead, but Betsy did not deserve that status. And yet he felt a sudden fury at his wife -- "Oh, Jesus Christ Almighty," he muttered.

The more you consider the two opening sentences of this passage, the more astonishing they become. The finality of "That was that" is emphasized by its simplicity and repetition, but then the sentence itself is repeated, the second time without an exclamation mark, as Jack downshifts from the immediate anger after the call, to a sense of resignation.

In the second paragraph, another daring sentence choice, "People walked by or perhaps no people walked by," a description that describes nothing. What makes this effective, is that instead of a bald statement such as, "Jack was unaware of his surroundings," this non-description shows us the unawareness. Moreover, it deepens an image planted earlier; whereas in the first excerpt, passersby didn't look at Jack because they were engaged with each other, Jack's inability to notice others now is because of his overwhelming isolation.

Having used repetition within repetition -- "And that was that! That was that." -- Strout repeats "deserved" seven times in the following paragraph. The intervals are highly irregular -- near the beginning of a sentence, in the middle, near the end, at one point separating two iterations by a single word, and then with two full sentences between one and the next -- refusing to fall into a predictable rhythm, and yet there is an unmistakable beat, like a man pounding his thigh with his fist. Jack almost seems to savor the karmic judgment the universe has dealt him. Now instead of Jack's "sloppy belly," the far more humiliating reality of his incontinence rises in his consciousness. 

There's a puzzling, somewhat jarring, word choice, that "Betty did not deserve that status." Partly, perhaps, the euphemism suggests a lingering unwillingness to face an unpleasant reality. Partly, maybe, the off-puttingly unemotional term "status" implies Jack's own off-putting lack of emotion. I think, however, that Strout's specifying a particular aspect of death. "Betsy didn't deserve to die," calls to mind not death itself, but the emotional and physical pain at the end of life. "Betsy didn't deserve death," sounds as if she'd been sentenced to the gas chamber, and still draws our attention to the act of dying. Referring to being dead as a "status" confronts us not with dying, but the state of being dead, the state of nonbeing. This is what Jack thinks he deserves: not to die, per se -- in any case, everyone dies eventually -- but not to exist.

Finally, he mutters, "Jesus Christ," profanity but at the same time an invocation of the man who offers forgiveness to all by a man unable to forgive himself.

To create something that is so artful, and yet so seemingly without artifice is a real accomplishment.

Next month, I'll attempt to model my own paragraph on of Strout's.

See you then.

PS - Strout's new novel, Lucy by the Sea, is available for pre-order.