Finding the extraordinary in ordinary people
By Philippa Tracy
Elizabeth Strout has written a number of best-selling literary novels, featuring complex and recurring characters in small-town America. These include Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. Having read and enjoyed Olive Kitteridge and a number of her other novels, I read her debut Amy and Isabelle, first published in 1998.
This novel is set in the fictional mill town of Shirley Falls in Maine. Strout herself grew up in Maine and this is where many of her novels are set. The action takes place over one hot summer a few months after a 12-year-old girl is kidnapped from a nearby town. There is tension in the air and Strout’s descriptions of the river as a dead snake in the middle of town, “flattened in the road with its insides seeping out, infected and nasty in the colorless sun” are ominous.
The main characters, a single mother, Isabelle Goodrow, and her 16-year-old daughter, Amy, like all of Strout’s characters, are complex. In an interview last year, Strout said that “all ordinary people are extraordinary.” In this novel, Strout’s focus is on the relationship between mother and daughter, their secrets, their vulnerabilities and their inner struggles. Amy and Isabelle live on the edge of town, not fitting into either the working-class Catholic community in the Basin or the middle-class community at Oyster Point. Isabelle’s desperation to fit in with the snobby WASPy women in particular creates some very poignant scenes.
Isabelle “stood apart from the rest.” She doesn’t have friends and her co-workers think she is a snob. She moved to Shirley Falls 14 years earlier, hoping to find a husband. She longs for attention from her boss, Avery Clark, the man who runs the mill, believing she would do a better job than his wife of making him happy. Reading Madame Bovary, she blames Emma Bovary for her own downfall and lack of ability to love her husband properly. Nor can she understand how other mothers, whose children are behaving criminally, are so unaware. This preoccupation with the failings of other women changes when she discovers Amy’s illicit affair with her maths teacher, Mr Robertson. Her response is brutal and will damage her relationship with Amy for a long time.
The story of Amy and Mr Robertson’s affair slowly unfolds. Strout brilliantly describes Amy’s vulnerabilities, her naive sexual longing and Mr Robertson’s calculated grooming. This unfolds in parallel with the description of the breakdown of the relationship between mother and daughter. They love and hate each other in equal measure. That summer there is “no escaping the heat or each other.” As the summer ends, secrets are revealed about Isabelle’s past and there is some hope of healing. Isabelle is redeemed by understanding and connecting with two of the other female characters, Dottie Brown, whose husband of 28 years has left her for a younger woman and “Fat Bev,” whose kindness overwhelms Isabelle when she is at her lowest.
Shirley Falls is a town full of secrets and “an assortment of human miseries.” What makes this book so moving and so readable is the depth of the characters in their ordinariness and their relatability. And the fact that Strout does not judge them. Shirley Falls is a town where most people just “did the best they could.”