by Elizabeth Spencer

“This is the story of Bob Burgess,” begins Elizabeth Strout’s tenth novel Tell Me Everything. However, it isn’t just Bob’s story—set in the fictional town of Crosby, Maine, Tell Me Everything reunites many of Strout’s beloved characters such as Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, and Bob’s brother Jim Burgess. Structured in four parts, the novel functions like a Russian doll—there are stories within stories, “all these unrecorded lives” as Lucy puts it. Readers who are new to Strout’s work should rest assured that Tell Me Everything, like her previous books, can be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel. 

Strout is a world builder, though not in the sci-fi sense. Her characters live in a world that resembles our own—the pandemic has happened, characters are worried about world events—but through the gradual accumulation of details, of griefs and joys and resentments both large and small, Strout constructs a singular world. The novel is also full of little flashes of insight such as: “We like to think that our lives are within our control, but they may not be completely so. We are necessarily influenced by those who have come before us.” 

After meeting Bob and his wife Margaret, a Unitarian minister, we come to Olive Kitteridge in her retirement community. Lucy and Olive have several visits over the course of the novel, in which they take turns telling each other stories. These tales of unrecorded lives lead to observations such as the fact that “many people in long marriages live with ghosts beside them.” Lucy and Olive’s conversations also serve as meditations on storytelling. What makes a story compelling? What are we looking for from stories? Why can a story be interesting to one person and boring to another? It’s enjoyable to see a novelist at the height of her powers explore these timeless questions.

Another recurring event in the novel is Bob’s walks with Lucy. They always meet at the same place by the river and tell each other what’s happening in their lives. Bob and Lucy are friends, but readers will wonder if one or both are in love with the other and how that will play out since they are both married or living with other people.

Lest you think Tell Me Everything is only a quiet, interior sort of novel, Strout adds a murder mystery to drive the plot. An older woman has gone missing and the son who lived with her seems the most likely suspect. Bob Burgess takes the case and the mystery unfolds at a satisfying pace.

In between these larger narrative arcs, minor characters show up and have their moments. Bob and Jim Burgess’ sister Susan drinks coffee with Gerry O’Hare a few mornings a week and neither talks about the fact that he jilted her in high school. A 55-year-old widow named Charlene contends with rising property taxes and financial insecurity. Bob’s ex-wife Pam stops drinking and tries to figure out what she wants to do with her life. Jim’s wife is diagnosed with cancer. These are the people and situations that help make Strout’s fictional world fully realized. This town could be your town; these characters could be you or your friends or parents. 

Strout is also good with the physical details of setting, showing us that a small town in Maine can be both a place where tourists visit in the summer as well as a place where your first impressions are of a car dealership and “large run-down wooden houses whose porches held things like bicycle tires and plastic toys and coat hangers and air conditioning units that had not been used in years.” People like Lucy and her ex-husband William, who live together in a waterfront house, represent the “haves” of Crosby while people like Charlene, working low-wage jobs and visiting food pantries in an effort to make rent, are the “have-nots.”

The concept of a “sin-eater” comes up in the novel: “Some people on this earth eat other people’s sins,” says Lucy, about a character in one of Olive’s stories and about Bob. The most formative event in Bob’s life was the death of his father, struck by the family car rolling down the driveway with Bob and his two siblings in it. For a long time, Bob thought he was responsible; then his brother Jim confessed. But they will never know what really happened. Questions of morality and how one person’s sins affect others in their life reverberate through the novel. Ultimately, readers will come away with the sense that no one is irredeemable. 

In Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout shows herself to be one of our finest living writers. Her characters are indelible, making you want to follow them from book to book, to go back and read the ones you missed. This quiet, tender, and thought-provoking novel would make a great winter read for fans of character-driven literary fiction. One of the last sentences in the book articulates a core theme: “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.”