There was a time when Elizabeth Strout’s fans had to wait a few years for the next book; but Tell Me Everything follows fast on her two previous novels – part of what she has termed a ‘marathon’ of writing in her sixties. It has been an extraordinary creative flowering: a diverting pleasure for admirers of her psychological perceptiveness and her ability to transport us instantly to Crosby, her fictional town in contemporary Maine.
Strout once described her characters as rolls of fabric, with her novels as her patterns to cut out. Much material is used in each novel, yet there is a lot of spare, too. It’s the fullness of these characters and their inner lives that give her work its depth. No character is underwritten or a flimsy cameo – men and women at the centre of earlier books are on the periphery of this one, but as fully realised as those who take centre stage. Their rich inner lives allow them to be a part of the world beyond Crosby.
The Booker-nominated Lucy by the Sea (2022), in which the writer Lucy Barton and her ex-husband isolated together, took stock of the pandemic with startling power, almost as it unfolded. It was something that convincingly happened to the characters in the same way as it happened for us. The pandemic’s aftershocks are still felt intensely in the latest book. Here, political division and tension are evident, as though Crosby, with its spectacular foliage and brutal winters, were a small town that you can’t quite find on the map.
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