Elizabeth Strout (2025) Tell Me Everything

I’m not a great fan of Elizabeth Strout. Yet Tell Me Everything is the fourth or her six books I’ve read. Explain that?

Well, the characters are familiar. As is the settings. Crosby, Maine and far-off (but not too far) New York.

‘This is the story of Bob Burgess, a tall, heavyset man who lives in the town of Crosby, Maine, and he is sixty-five years old at the time we are speaking of him. Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself, like many of us…’

If you’re not underwhelmed by that opening paragraph you’ve not spent thousands of pounds or dollars trying to hook an agent or publisher. (Nor have I, if you’re querying fuck off.)

Bob loves Lucy. That’s good. Because he’s got a big heart, maybe the can share it like an ice-cream.

Lucy has a big heart too. I wouldn’t use that term ‘big heart’ (even though I have) because it’s a cliché. Lucy is a writer that Elizabeth Strout has placed centrally in her earlier novels. A writer writing about a writer. A version of write what you know. Stephen King does it lots.

Bob and Lucy are ‘sin eaters’. That’s an idea Lucy/Strout runs with.  Jesus, without sin, takes away the sins of the world in Catholic mass. Somewhere in the world, an altar boy is ringing a bell. Sin eaters usually end up crucified, which is always a good story.

Best tone it down. Add resurrection. Lucy is so empathetic and in tune that she grieves the loss of leaves in two plants she’s trying to save and gives them names like a cat. Bob feels her pain.

I’m with the Prophet Job on this one. ‘Mine hope hath he removed like a tree,’ is as far out on a limb as I’ll go.

‘My days are past, my purposes are broken off, even the thoughts of my heart… if I wait the grave is mine house.’

Job’s description can be applied to us old yins generally or the straight talking matriarch Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again who is over 90 here, but has lost none of her sharpness.

She doesn’t take to Lucy at first. Predictably, she warms to her as Bob does, but for different reasons. They exchange stories as a way of widening the background of the novel.

Schoolteacher Patty Nicely for example. Nicely. You got it. Her job is to be nice. And develop the idea of the sin eater.

Central to the collection of overlapping stories is murder, incest and rape. But these are always held collectively as a story about a story and the secrecy that follows and destroys.

‘People are broken,’ is Lucy Barton’s view on it. Rich and poor alike. I blame the rich, but I’m admittedly biased.

Bob as the town’s lawyer takes on the case of Matt Beach, who is accused of murdering his mother. Bob knows how that feels. Having accidentally killed his dad when he was four by putting the family car into gear. Or at least, he thought he did. Now he’s not so sure of anything. His marriage to Elizabeth, the Unitarian minister, or what he should do next. The one sure thing for him is his overwhelming love for Lucy.

She’s also married. Kinda. She’s living with her ex-husband. William Gerhardt. He’s  a bore that finds it hard to talk much about parasitic potato blight and how best to control them. Lucy worries he’s narcissistic. The opposite of sin eater. So shallow he makes the moron’s moron Trump seem three dimensional. Being empathetic and broken herself, she’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt—which doesn’t apply to the moron’s moron, obviously. Not unless you’re a psychopath too.

Matt Beach, the accused, is more sinned against than sinner. He carries the weight of the town’s guilt.

With Bob as a lawyer and mentor, the reader can expect a cosy-mystery ending, where everybody is a little bit older and a little bit wiser. This is the last of the Elisabeth Strout novels I’ll pick up. Promise. Read on.  

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6