Brings together Strout’s most indelible characters in a rich tapestry, intricately wrought yet effortlessly realized, both suspenseful and meditative ... An achingly moving and exhilarating novel that brings people together across lines of age, gender, profession, political affiliation.
Will feel like old home week to the more faithful of Ms. Strout’s readers ... Compassionate if rather gimmicky ... Encompasses a year—Ms. Strout’s Shaker-spare evocation of the changing seasons is lovely. But sometimes, it feels like an awfully long year. There is so much going on, so many sagas; some, particularly those involving Jim Burgess’s family, tilt toward soap opera. Some verge on the incomprehensible.
Tender ... Strout’s best work exhibits some of this same duality, her prose style at once familiar and beguilingly unpredictable. In Tell Me Everything, the former quality often outweighs the latter; the 'Stroutness' of the writing can feel oddly emphatic ... These devices feel overused and somewhat threadbare here; over time they have lost the power to evoke the strong feeling they did in earlier books. Still, Tell Me Everything offers readers an abundance of the searing and plain-spoken insights for which Strout is beloved ... Strout is a master at conjuring emotion with a simple palette, at bringing a reader to tears without feeling the least bit manipulated.
Strout packs more empathy onto a single page than most writers scatter throughout an entire book ... There is no such thing as an unworthy story. Nor, in Strout’s hands, a dull one ... How fortunate to connect once again with this deeply humane writer.
Reads like the stories that Lucy Barton shares with Olive throughout the novel. Simple. Relatable. Elegant, even ... Strout’s gift is making readers stop and think about lives — from the exciting to the mundane — and that’s what makes this book so appealing.
Strout is a magician. From what might seem cussedly bathetic, deliberately underplayed, she produces rabbit after rabbit; moments of such sadness or illumination that the reader may feel momentarily winded before being compelled to continue ... The novel gains much of its power through gaps and silences. There is plenty of white space between chapters that are often short and fragmented; occasionally, Strout gives only a piece of punctuation.
Though Strout peers into these lives with warmth and compassion...she has tended to do so without sentimentality ... And yet her recent novels, including the latest, are not as adept at treading that line ... The problem with Tell Me Everything is that everyone is innocent, or at least absolved ... What happened to Strout? The writing does not feel lazy or complacent. Nor, despite an almost comical amount of hemming and hawing in the dialogue, would I exactly call it timid ...
Once again, Strout has managed to compress key histories from her earlier books into a few telling sentences, a miracle of distillation that opens this novel, and the Strout ecosystem, to new and old readers alike. Lucy Barton, Bob Burgess and Olive Kitteridge are among the signature creations of the modern literary canon. May we continue to reap the richness and surprise of their separate and commingled lives.
The narrative combines two of Strout’s preoccupations: the reverberating, intergenerational effects of poverty, and the power of connection and empathy, demonstrating how stories can illuminate our worst moments and commemorate our best ... May be most gratifying for Strout’s longtime fans. But these very human characters, with their specific yet universal questions about others’ lives and their own, are also sure to win over those who haven’t read her before.
So far this is reassuringly familiar territory to fans of Strout’s fiction. And then it all becomes subtly strange. Interleaved with these tales of ordinarily damaged families is a genuine murder mystery ... In this taciturn but deeply felt and profoundly intelligent novel, a kindly blank page is as good as it gets. Tell me everything. Or tell me nothing.
Elizabeth Strout doesn’t write procedurals, but she cares about processes; she is not one for institutions as such, but she is invested in how systems work and what it looks like when they break down ... If there is a single running theme in this book, it is that of storytelling, the oral transmission of narrative and feeling that only exists in the telling ... Strout’s criminal plot becomes tremendously clarifying ... The mystery of the narrator is the closest Strout can come to recording the unrecordable and, in a sense, erase herself as acclaimed author and Oprah guest and establish herself as a kind of sensitive, begrudging performer on the page.
With tenderness, honesty, intimacy, and compassion, Strout uses her cunning powers of observation to draw readers beyond the mundane to the miraculous complexities where true friendship lies.
Strout’s tenderness for her characters and her belief that love is the only force in human lives as powerful as our essential loneliness are as moving as ever. But this all seems like very well-plowed terrain. Strout’s many fans will love this sweet, rambling tale. More critical readers may feel it’s time for her to move on.
The narrative threads make for dishy small-town drama, but even more satisfying are the insights Strout weaves into the dialogue ... Longtime fans and newcomers alike will relish this.
