In both Olive novels, Strout has created a wonderfully eccentric Mainer who verges, like most eccentrics, on self-parody, yet emerges finally as endearing, even beloved. Olive is the protagonist in some stories and a background presence in others, providing moral support and sympathy for girls and women who find themselves emotionally isolated. Olive, Again is a modestly self-effacing title for these 13 vividly realized interlocking tales shaped into a novel in the mode of Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio and Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, exploring the claustrophobia and loneliness of small-town life.
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