Interviews Reviews Summaries of Anything Is Possible by Strout
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Elizabeth Strout'southward Lovely New Novel Is a Requiem for Small-Town Pain
ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE
By Elizabeth Strout
254 pages. Random House. $27.
Anyone who'southward ever experienced depression, even the tiniest mote, knows that there'south great power in relief. Certainly Olive Kitteridge, the protagonist of Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the aforementioned proper noun, knew this. "Pleasure is the absence of pain," Olive thought to herself at 1 point, recalling the words of a philosopher she'd read in college. (She couldn't recall who. Epicurus.) She may as well accept been speaking for whatsoever of Strout's characters. The things they carry are heavy. Not to suffer would exist more than than enough.
And oh, how the characters suffer in Strout'due south latest novel, "Anything Is Possible"! The title seems a hateful joke, given the book's ground forces of hurting men and women, desperate for liberation from their wounds.
To depict the plot, to the extent that there even is one, is pointless. Like "Olive Kitteridge," "Anything Is Possible" is actually a necklace of short stories about people in a small town, studded with clues about who'due south connected to whom. (Strout was born to be an omniscient narrator, built-in to flit and dive from one crooked perch to the next.)
Information technology is nearly useful to think near Strout's work thematically. The aforementioned ideas continually preoccupy her, and her characters ofttimes deport in like ways. They indulge in the petty comforts of gossip, their judgments disguised every bit concern, their desperation to reassure themselves of their luck — and virtue — disguised as pity. They throb with loneliness and fume with disappointment. (A lot of her characters are old, very old, and are bitter to discover where they have ended upward.) Grown children defend parents who had done the indefensible, their mercy almost saintly in its compensation; or they do its opposite, clinging to righteous fury over parental infractions on a more homo scale, driving their mothers wild with grief and remorse.
And many characters walk around with keen satchels of unexpressed love.
"Because he was Charlie and non someone else," Strout writes of Charlie Macauley, a damaged Vietnam veteran, "he could not say to his son: You are decent and strong, and none of this has anything to do with me; simply you came through it, that childhood that wasn't all roses, and I'chiliad proud of y'all, I'm amazed by y'all."
Where this volume sharply departs from Strout'southward previous work is in its frank, unapologetic accent on forbidden desire. Not a affiliate spins by, practically, without the unveiling of some sexual secret. In that location are stories of voyeurism. Prostitution. A father's secret gay life. Nosotros find, to our horror, that the hubby of i of the most tender, largehearted characters, Patty Nicely, was repeatedly raped every bit a child. When she was a child, Patty herself walked in on her mother in flagrante delicto — with Patty's Spanish teacher, who was spanking her.
"Her mother could not finish herself from wailing," Strout writes, "this is what Patty saw, her mother'south breasts and her female parent's eyes looking at her — even so unable to stop what was coming from her oral fissure."
Epitome
The trauma of the primal scene, which may or may not involve both parents, is central in "Annihilation Is Possible." It misshapes the psychosexual futures of many innocents. The best they can promise for in adulthood is not to recapitulate the crimes that were done to them.
And so where, you might ask, is the relief in such a book?
"Annihilation Is Possible" is certainly more grim than Strout's previous work. It'due south more than audacious, too, and more than merciless, daring you to walk away. "Picayune House on the Prairie" assumes a mythic condition amongst some of its characters. This book is its terrible opposite. No chirping families to exist found amid the swaying golden fields here.
But the writing is wrenchingly lovely. Information technology almost always is with Strout, whether she's knitting metaphors or summarizing, with agonizing economic system, whole episodes of a life: "Having met in their belatedly thirties, they'd had only eight years together. No children. Patty had never known a improve man."
Yous read Strout, actually, for the same reason you listen to a requiem: to experience the beauty in sadness.
For those who take read Strout's previous novel, "My Name Is Lucy Barton," this book as well offers the pleasures of intertextual sport. "Anything Is Possible" takes identify in Amgash, Sick., the town of Lucy's birth. Though readers never actually went there — we only heard tales of it from Lucy'southward mother, who prattled on about its beleaguered residents during a hospital visit with Lucy in New York — this new novel all the same feels like a homecoming of sorts, with familiar-sounding characters now earning chapters of their own. Like the "Pretty Nicely Girls," whose female parent's thing liquidated the family. And Charlie Macauley, whose experience in Vietnam liquidated his soul. And of class, the Bartons.
The meta conceit of "My Name Is Lucy Barton," which the reader only realizes partway in, is that the novel is meant to be the actual "published" memoir of Lucy, its author-narrator. "Anything Is Possible" is sly, as well. Characters in the boondocks of Amgash purchase Lucy's book at the local bookstore; they quote from information technology; they make annotation of its cover (which looks like the real-life cover of "My Name Is Lucy Barton").
But the most startling thing the reader discovers in this book is that "Lucy Barton" wasn't the whole truth. You may think, having read it, that y'all know the Barton family. Trust me: You don't. Those children suffered cruelty of an phenomenal magnitude, far worse than Strout originally conveyed. That their male parent couldn't stop diddling himself in their presence, and on the job, is just the half of it. It was their female parent who inflicted the nigh harm. Lucy was holding out on us — possibly willfully, or possibly considering the complete truth, half-glimpsed, was all her adult self could tolerate.
But her siblings take fuller memories. Her sister in particular tin cite chapter and poetry of her mother'due south crimes. "Yous want truthful sentences?" she asks in the new novel, after a noisome litany of them rolls off her tongue. "Write about that."
"I don't desire to write that story," Lucy replies.
"And who'd want to read it?" asks her brother.
We would. And we do.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/26/books/review-elizabeth-strout-anything-is-possible.html
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