Elizabeth Strout - Anything Is Possible

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another gem from Elizabeth Strout

I thought My Name Is Lucy Barton was outstandingly good, but I wasn't at all sure about a follow-up which is effectively a series of linked short stories about characters in small-town Illinois who are linked, some closely and some peripherally, to Lucy Barton.  In fact, Anything Is Possible is, in my view, just as good. 

Elizabeth Strout here does what she has been doing so well for so long: she creates completely recognisable, complete and believable characters and examines the important things in everyday life – family ties, love, kindness, selfishness, decency, wickedness, human damage and so on – through their eyes.  In less brilliant hands it could be dull or forced or facile, but Strout has an extraordinarily shrewd understanding of the common complexities of life and the wonderful skill to put these over plainly but with humanity and compassion.  Often, we see people's realisation that they have ended up somewhere they didn’t expect, and their life isn't even quite the life they thought they were in.  We see, too, the understanding that acting to change things can bring difficulty and pain as well, perhaps, as liberation.  As one of Strout's characters sums it up, "she saw [her]as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be."

I love Strout's prose, which has a graceful simplicity to it.  It manages to be extraordinarily evocative while seeming gently straightforward.  It is all in the third person, but the voice of each subject is very well evoked, so what she is writing about is quietly vivid, whether it is kindness or great wickedness – and we get both here, plus a full range of very human characters with their own mannerisms and quirks all laid gently before us with great clarity and insight. 

In one place Strout writes, "she pictured her mother's quick and gracious loveliness to that man on the street."  I think "gracious loveliness" is a fitting description of the quality of this book.  Very, very warmly recommended.