Never a dull moment

Our book club is reading Olive Kitteridge this month, an amazing book of linked short stories by Elizabeth Strout. I don’t remember ever encountering a character like Olive in fiction. She is not a nice person, but there is never a dull moment when she is on the page. Here is how the NY Times sums it up:

The pleasure in reading “Olive Kitteridge” comes from an intense identification with complicated, not always admirable, characters. And there are moments in which slipping into a character’s viewpoint seems to involve the revelation of an emotion more powerful and interesting than simple fellow feeling — a complex, sometimes dark, sometimes life-sustaining dependency on others. There’s nothing mawkish or cheap here. There’s simply the honest recognition that we need to try to understand people, even if we can’t stand them.