‘Tell Me Everything’ listens in on the stories of the heart

Elizabeth Strout packs more empathy onto a single page than most writers scatter throughout an entire book. Her fiction is filled with the scarred and the scared, good parents and bad, perpetrators and survivors, sinners and what she calls “sin-eaters.” Many of her characters are chronically lonely and emotionally fragile. Some are curmudgeons, gossips, narcissists, and bullies. The wonder is that she makes our hearts go out to all of them. 

In fact, Strout loves her characters so much that she keeps going back to them.

Her 10th book, “Tell Me Everything,” brings together several of her best-loved protagonists. These include Bob Burgess, a truly good man who doesn’t realize how special he is. Bob, who was featured in 2013’s “The Burgess Boys” grew up in Shirley Falls, Maine, believing he was responsible for his father’s accidental death. After years as an attorney for Legal Aid in New York City, he moved back to his home state to marry Margaret Estaver, a Unitarian minister, who became his second wife.  

One of the main threads of “Tell Me Everything” is the dangerously close friendship that develops between Bob and writer Lucy Barton, who started taking weekly walks together during the pandemic, when Lucy moved from New York City to shelter in the fictional coastal town of Crosby, Maine. (This was the subject of Strout’s last novel, “Lucy by the Sea.”) During their ongoing strolls in “Tell Me Everything,” Bob and Lucy confide their deepest fears and regrets to each other – things they have repeatedly told their distracted partners, with little response. In contrast, Bob and Lucy’s conversations are peppered gratifyingly – though sometimes a tad cloyingly – with “I hear you” and “I get it.” 

Among Bob’s admirers is crusty, 90-year-old Olive Kitteridge, who asks him to summon Lucy to her retirement home because she has a story she wants to tell her. Things get off to a chilly start when Olive greets the writer celebrated for her sympathetic novels about have-nots and outcasts with this blunt criticism: “I thought your memoirs were a little self-pitying, myself. You’re not the only person to come from poverty.” But Lucy stays, and finds Olive’s story – about discovering an old clipping in her mother’s purse that sheds new light on her life – a heartbreaking tale of thwarted love. One story leads to many more, which build a bridge between the two women.

“Tell Me Everything” is in fact a book about storytelling. It is also about really listening to other people. “And who – who who who in this whole entire world – does not want to be heard?” asks Strout’s unnamed, omniscient narrator, who channels both the folksy wisdom of the Stage Manager from Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” and the author herself, with frequent sighs and “ohs.”

Strout sets the tone in the very first paragraph: “Bob has a big heart, but he does not know that about himself; like many of us, he does not know himself as well as he assumes to, and he would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.” 

This, in a nutshell, is Strout’s credo. It is also the theme of this novel, and central to her appeal: There is no such thing as an unworthy story. Nor, in Strout’s hands, a dull one.

Where “Lucy by the Sea” encompassed the growing unrest and division in America, in “Tell Me Everything” issues such as class resentments, climate change, and longer lines at the local food pantry are largely peripheral. Instead, the latter novel chronicles the ebb and flow of her characters’ lives over the course of a pivotal year. And because Strout deftly slips in background information on each of them, you need not have read her previous novels to enjoy this one. 

The simplicity and warmth of the narrator, who makes declarations like “Autumn comes early to Maine” and “And so life continued in Crosby, Maine,” also evoke E.B. White, another longtime Maine resident and wonderfully plainspoken writer. But like Strout’s other books, “Tell Me Everything” is more complex and tightly constructed than it at first appears.    

The novel deftly braids together three blossoming relationships: between Lucy and Bob, between Lucy and Olive, and, most movingly, between Bob and Matthew Beach, the isolated and traumatized prime suspect in the murder of his mother, 86-year-old Gloria Beach, whose body is found in a local quarry. Bob agrees to take the case, and becomes the caring friend and father figure Matthew never had. Gloria was such a nasty person that everyone who hears about her death says they wouldn’t blame the murderer – but even she becomes sympathetic once we learn about the terrible things she experienced in her youth and early adulthood.

Here’s another thing about Strout: There is nothing rosy about her view of life. As Olive realizes, every story she and Lucy share is about the same thing: “People suffer. They live, they have hope, they even have love, and they still suffer. Everyone does.” What’s the point, they wonder. Lucy concedes that what they’ve been sharing are indeed “stories of loneliness and love.” But also, she adds, “the small connections we make in this world if we are lucky.” 

How fortunate to connect once again with this deeply humane writer.