I bought Olive Kitteridge some weeks ago now, but have only just started reading it. Normally I read non-fiction, but I will read fiction if it catches me. When I hear about a work of fiction that I might want to read, I get a copy, open it randomly and read. If those few paragraphs reach out of the page and get me then I buy the book. If they don’t I put it back. Harsh I suppose but there it is.

However, in this case I didn’t do any of that. I bought the book based on the recommendation of a friend. I ordered it from my local bookstore along with two or three others. When they came in, I went to pick them up but since I was in the middle of several bits of non-fiction, the novels went on the shelf for “later.”

Later finally came for Olive Kitteridge.

I am rarely so moved by fiction. I have not finished it yet. It has become one of those books that I savor, like tappenade on toast for breakfast. I will not allow myself to read more than a story a day. I cannot really.

When I read the story about the man who planned to kill himself, I could feel something in me twist with the ending. My mother was suicidal and self-obsessed and to be honest that rarely turns out well. There is no way to know what Kevin does once his time on the stage of the story is over, but for those moments in the sea with Patty, he got to see something, to really see the life force of another, something my mother never did manage. The fact that Strout was able to take what is plainly pitiful and turn it into something gloriously human is, for me, the essence of why she deserved that Pulitzer.

I know I will be thinking about that book for a long time. Apart from anything else there is the structure of it and how it works to provide a platform for the world Strout has created. The fact that she uses related small-stories to talk-around her titled character, never really presenting her full on (at least so far), that does something to me and to the tenor of the world.  I recognize that feeling from the way I respond to Indian stories and Indian culture; sometimes the best way to really see something is from the side or out of the corner of your eye.

It takes longer to get to know someone this way, but it also provides more depth-of-field and it is ever so much more respectful of the delicacy and power that is a life lived.

Then I read an entry called What’s the fuss about episodic fiction over at that wonderful site Tales from the Reading Room. I hadn’t thought about Olive Kitteridge as episodic fiction. The term does something added to my sense that this kind of story telling, by looking aslant, is more like what I know from the Rez. I don’t really know what that “something” is yet; I can feel it rooting around in my cerebral cellar, but I haven’t seen its snout poke up above the stairs yet. It will, and if I feel it worth speaking, I will post about it. Maybe once I finish the stories.