Anything is Possible(?) The Book Review

This is a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Strout that follow on from her novel My Name is Lucy Barton. This time we are in the small town of Amgash, Illinois, which Lucy left behind when she moved to New York and went on to be a successful writer.

We meet some of Lucy’s past neighbours, her siblings and other town folk, and they are a real mixed bunch of characters! Each their own burdens to bear, whether it’s the death of a loved one, a horrific upbringing or even one character who has a rapist for a husband, the stories are all different but linked through Lucy and the town. For example with Tommy, whose story starts the collection, we learn that his farm burned down in the night many years previous and he had to get a new job as a janitor at the School where Lucy attended, but he had always carried around an understanding that God spoke to him that night of the fire. His story is very different story to Patty, a lonely widow, and her sister Linda who lives a completely different life with her husband.

For me, the stand-out stories came from Charlie, a Vietnam war-veteran, still suffering many years later from PTSD and the impact it has had on his marriage; and Dottie, a B&B owner who has a startling interaction with a guest.

Dottie was, in fact, a bit older than Mrs Small, but Dottie had taken to the Internet like a paddlefish waiting for water; she was sorry it hadn’t arrived when she was a younger woman, she was certain she could have been successful at something that made use of her mind more than the renting out rooms for these past many years. She could have been rich! But Dottie was not a woman to complain, having been taught by her decent Aunt Edna one summer – it seemed like a hundred years ago, and it practically was – that a complaining woman was like pushing dirt under the fingernails of God, and this was an image that Dottie had never been able to fully dislodge.

Anything is Possible, By Elizabeth Strout

I’ve not read a huge amount of short stories before (something I am trying to rectify now), because I’ve often found that they feel like too small a snippet of a story: you just get into it and then it ends and your thrust forward into the next story. But a short story can leave a lasting impression because of that very sense of being cut off and the questions left unanswered. As Joanne Harris comments at the start of her short story collection Jigs and Reels:

A good short story…can stay with you for much longer than a novel. It can startle, ignite, illuminate and move in a way that the longer format cannot. It is often more troubling, often frightening or subversive. It provokes questions, whereas most novels tend to try to find the answer to them…

Personally, I find short stories difficult and slow to write. To compress an idea into such a small space, to keep its proportions, to find the voice, is both demanding and frustrating. four or five thousand words, which might take me a day to write as part of a novel, may take me two weeks to finish as a short story.

Jigs & Reels, by Joanne Harris

But with these stories (with the exception of Cracked which was strange and unsettling), I wasn’t left feeling as though any of them had an abrupt ending. With the links of the quirky small-town and the character of Lucy Barton, each story felt part of a wider picture, and a character mentioned in the background of one story may pop up again or even take centre stage in the next.

You don’t need to have read My Name Is Lucy Barton to be able to enjoy this collection; I haven’t read it and I feel as though I understood the town and family dynamics and still got a lot from reading it. I have read one of Elizabeth Strout’s previous books, Olive Kitteridge, which has a similar format of being a novel told in short stories and, I have to admit, that it kind of went over my head at the time and, whilst I enjoyed it I feel that I missed a lot of the nuance and detail. With Anything is Possible, however, I felt completely immersed and really enjoyed reading about the town and the characters as their stories surprised me. It’s made me wonder if I should go back and re-read Olive Kitteridge as I enjoyed the format so much this time that maybe I would get more from it.

If anything is possible, then this book would be best enjoyed whilst staying on a farm in rural America looking out at the “little corn plants and fresh bright soybeans” growing in the fields, but if that is not possible, then it would be just as good on the sofa on a brisk Tuesday afternoon.