My Book Pick: Olive Kitteridge

My book pick for June is Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009). I’ve been a teacher most of my life, and, during this last month of the school year, the teachers I’ve had as I went to school and the teachers I’ve taught with are often on my mind. Olive Kitteridge, a crusty, complex retired teacher is, as a character, a force unto herself – but I recognize many aspects of her personality. Hefty, blunt and unapologetic, she is someone who is used to controlling the world of junior high math classes and who is often quicker at pegging the imperfections that abound in the world beyond the schoolroom than she is at assessing her own failings.

The book is essentially a collection of linked stories, some of which offer us just a glimpse of Olive; others unfold with her as the central character. I admire Strout’s ability to shape the portrait through this shifting prism of perceptions. In the initial story, which unfolds from the vantage of her husband, Henry, we see Olive in an unflattering light, resistant to entertaining the new pharmacy assistant, Denise, whom Henry has taken under his wing. When Denise and her husband come to dinner, spilled ketchup augers a hunting-accident tragedy that will alter Denise’s life. And Henry, caught up in his care and love for this younger woman, grows, ultimately, to value the older one he has lived with all his married life – and, God knows, Olive is not an especially easy person to love. But then, is love ever easily explained?

As the stories unfold, we get to know an Olive Kitteridge who is savvy enough to help a young man, a former student, into embracing life (almost as if she knows he has a rifle wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of his truck), and who is torn by her inability to truly help a girl, living on the streets, who is anorexic (Olive drawn to her chippiness and her facility at playing her life out as a kind of sad game). But we also discover an Olive Kitteridge who fails to understand how she has managed to turn her own son against her, who is angered at the trick of fate that turns Henry into a vegetative old, blind man in a senior care centre, and who is unable to accept  the duo of daughters-in-law who intrude on her self-centered plans for keeping her son close by.

An assortment of characters from the small Maine town Strout uses to anchor her stories swirl around Olive as she heads out for her daily doughnut fix, walks her dog along the seashore, and labours over her tulip garden. There’s Winnie, an eleven-year-old, and her older sister, Julie, a jilted bride, tiptoeing around their mother who aims platitudes at them about living an upbeat life while she’s ready with a gun to shoot the returning suitor. And there’s the alcoholic Angela O’Meara, who, for years, has played piano four nights a week at the Warehouse Bar and Grill, where she encounters an old boyfriend at Christmas who leaves her with the parting gift of a revelation about her mother that may be no surprise to Angela. Just a couple from a wide and varied cast Strout brings onstage.

Strout is a stylist who seems to write with the salt-wind of New England investing her words. Spare, exact prose that gives the reader a strong sense of place and an incisive look at the beings who inhabit that place. She is also, at times, very funny, as she examines the relationships within families and among those living together in a community – her humour sometimes dark and edgy. Perhaps more than anything else, though, Olive Kitteridge is a book about growing old, at times without grace or understanding, but ultimately embracing the journey as it wends its way to the end. As Olive reflects, at the conclusion of the novel: It baffled her, the world. She did not want to leave it yet.

My Movie Pick: Driving Miss Daisy

With scenes from Olive Kitteridge playing through my mind, I couldn’t help thinking about Driving Miss Daisy, a film which also offers us a portrait of a retired teacher who isn’t the easiest person to live with. In April, I had a chance to catch the remounted stage version on Broadway, with Vanessa Redgrave as Miss Daisy and James Earl Jones playing Hoke, the chauffeur. While I enjoyed the play a great deal, I prefer the film with Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman in the lead roles. Somehow the movie camera allows us a more nuanced look at these characters and the world of the South during the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

Alfred Uhry’s play was filmed by Australian director Bruce Beresford in 1989. Beresford doesn’t seem to be embittered over the fact that the movie won a best picture Oscar while the Academy failed to nominate him as its director. “When the writing is that good,” Beresford noted, “you’ve really just got to set the camera up and photograph it.” True – the movie script has been changed little from the stage script, but I think we need to credit Beresford for finding the visual terms and vantage points for presenting the narrative in a way that enriches and enhances the dialogue and action and uses the film medium to its fullest potential. It is beautifully shot and orchestrated by someone who has an intuitive feeling for mood and tone.

The story follows the relationship of a well-heeled Jewish widow, Daisy Werthan, and the chauffeur she reluctantly acquires when she backs her car over an embankment at the bottom of her yard and discovers that she will have difficulty, at her age (she’s 72), getting insurance for a new vehicle. Her son, Boolie (Dan Ackroyd nicely reigned in to character) hires Hoke Colburn whose former boss, a judge, has recently died. At first, Miss Daisy refuses to ride with Hoke. There’s a hilarious scene in which she finally gets into the car to go to the Piggly Wiggly and Hoke gets his first taste of what it’s going to be like having Daisy Werther as a backseat driver. Her reliance on Hoke builds as he brings her coffee during an ice storm that has kept everyone else off the roads; as he drives her out of state to a birthday celebration in Alabama (confronting a couple of bigoted highway patrolmen); and chauffeurs her to the synagogue through an Atlanta in which Civil Rights groups are beginning to rally and churches are being bombed.

Of course, one of the main points of Uhry’s play is the embedded prejudice in Miss Daisy who likes to think of herself as liberal-minded. Hoke’s dignity and patience in the face of Daisy’s intransigence and thoughtlessness allows him to emerge as the person in this duo with the most humanity. But Jessica Tandy’s Miss Daisy is never a one-note characterization and we see her growing love and admiration for this gentle giant as the decades roll by. When she realizes that Hoke is illiterate, she digs into her cache of old school resources and teaches him to read and write. With the death of her housekeeper and cook, Idella (Esther Rolle), she and Hoke begin to cook and eat together. At the end, Daisy, now 97, unable to feed herself any more, lovingly allows Hoke to feed her.

Driving Miss Daisy is a film infused with humour and the celebration of life’s joys as well as its difficulties. Daisy Werther has her books and opera records; her flowerbeds, and games of Mahjong with her synagogue cronies. Hoke’s love for cars is evinced as he buys and restores the old cars whenever Miss Daisy purchases a new one – and we become aware of his growing pride in his family who are moving beyond the servitude expected of the Black Americans of his generation. Tandy’s two performances late in her life – in Fried Green Tomatoes and here in Driving Miss Daisy are treasures she has left behind for upcoming generations to savor and enjoy. What a wonderful actress! And Morgan Freeman? What can I say? If he’d never made another film, this one would seal his status as one of the great screen actors of his time.