Anything Is Possible

"But this was life! And it was messy!"
After Elizabeth Strout wrote My Name is Lucy Barton she was moved to tell the stories of the hometown characters Lucy and her mother had talked about, resulting in Anything is Possible.

In Strout's prize-winning book Olive Kitteridge each character is touched by Olive; in Anything is Possible it is Lucy Barton who provides the context for each story.

The suffering behind the stories made my heart ache. Poverty, abuse, deep loneliness, and loveless lives have left their marks on these characters. And yet--and yet--their resilience is rewarded with moments of grace, a nod of understanding, friendship offered unexpected--the small gifts that shed a ray of hope that life can be different.

As I was reading show more Strout I was also reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. I noted similarities between the books: crushing childhood poverty, resilience, and an understanding that being truthful about life isn't pretty.

Lucy's sister Vicky asks Lucy why she doesn't write the truth of what happened to their family. Who'd want to read that story? their brother Pete asks. I would, Vicky replies. I was reminded of a scene from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn where Francie's teacher tells Francie to write pretty stories, not stories about drunkenness and poverty, the stories of Francie's real life. The question always is, do writers tell the truth or 'pretty' life up? Strout has decided that life is messy, and yet, as Pete tells Vicky, we don't turn out so bad in spite of it.

It is Strout's honesty that is unsettling and moving. By entering these character's lives we learn compassion. We walk in their shoes for a while and they become more than a recluse, or a fat lady, or the poor kids who ate from dumpsters.

The best part is the compassion these characters have for each other. Lucy's brother Pete remarks that their mother 'just wasn't made right,' and Lucy agrees but adds, "She had grit. She hung in there."

At a time when Americans are trying to understand the force behind popularism and the political climate, we are turning to literature to understand the experiences of those who are from different backgrounds. Forget some of the over-marketed best sellers. Read Strout.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review. show less

Ever since I read the Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, I have made it a point to read Elizabeth Strout. Her latest two books, My Name is Lucy Barton, and this one are linked novels, this one filling in some of the stories of the people mentioned in the first. Like Olive Kitteridge, Lucy only appears in one of these interconnected nine stories, but she is referred to often by the people being depicted in the small town of Amgash, Illinois. Lucy is the one that made it. A hard working student who often stayed in the school after hours rather than go home. She has become a writer of note and her new memoir is now available in her home town. The NYT notes "Anything Is Possible” is really a necklace of short stories about people in show more a small town, studded with clues about who’s connected to whom. (Strout was born to be an omniscient narrator, born to flit and swoop from one crooked perch to the next."
The characters are perfectly drawn with traces of their upbringing never far away enough to free them. In this town everyone know how mistreated you were or how you found food in the dumpster, or how the Vietnam war changed you.
Richard Russo,another favorite, does this in his novels, paints wonderful small town characters, but his are more lighthearted. Strout's are suffering more,trying to prove who's better than another. Remember the line from Lucy Barton- "I have said before: It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down." These kind of truths ring true throughout her work.
"You read Strout, really, for the same reason you listen to a requiem: to experience the beauty in sadness."(NYT). Beauty in sadness is a good summary for this highly recommended work.
Good lines:
This was the skin that protected you from the world--this loving of another person you shared your life with.

And you have always taken up so much space in my heart that it has sometimes felt to be a burden.

What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway--like phantom limbs, he supposed.

“And so there’s a struggle, or a contest, I guess you could say, all the time, it seems to me. And remorse, well, to be able to show remorse—to be able to be sorry about what we’ve done that’s hurt other people—that keeps us human.” show less

Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout is a very highly recommended transcendent postscript to My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016). This is a superb novel.

Anything Is Possible returns us to Amgash, Illinois, and explores the stories found in the lives of others who lived there and the connections they have to each other and Lucy. This exquisite novel is told through a series of chapters that are individual stories which capture the fundamental essence of people's lives (the same approach she took in Olive Kitteridge). Strout manages to capture the whole spectrum of human emotions across the years in these perfect individual but interconnected vignettes.

The themes are timeless, including: the search for love and happiness; self-respect; show more faith; the bonds of families; divorce and infidelity; the gulf between poverty and privilege; violence and abuse; The individual stories together to create a portrait of a community and those who had ties to it. Not all the stories are completely sad, but they all have a melancholy undertone as the characters have faced the complexities of life and grown from their experiences (or not).

The writing is extraordinary, impeccable, and... just perfect. The characters and setting in each story are finely drawn and eloquently described, even when the lives are damaged and struggling.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Random House.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2017/04/anything-is-possible.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1981601978 show less

My Name is Short Stories related to Lucy Barton

The marketing wants to insist that this is a novel, but anyone reading it after a while will realize it is a collection of short stories with connecting links primarily provided by the members of the Barton and Nicely families who were first introduced by the author's earlier "My Name Is Lucy Barton". Lucy Barton only appears in a single story, but her family and especially her own book are referred to several times.

The connecting thread is more the hardscrabble lives lived by former inhabitants of the fictional Amgash, Illinois who have mostly elected to move on both physically and figuratively from impoverished childhoods. I was reminded of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio", although show more there it is the narrator who is moving on. Anderson also didn't market his short stories book as a novel, but presumably Penguin Random House thought it the better modern-day marketing move for "Anything is Possible."

Despite often dire and sometimes creepy circumstances (e.g. the story "Cracked") there is an overall positive view that shines through in most of these stories making the optimistic title "Anything is Possible" very appropriate. And certainly Elizabeth Strout's writing is very compelling, you just have to keep reading to find out what each character's fates are and what will be revealed about the demons that made them.

Reader's Tip: Drawing a Barton and Nicely families tree would not be amiss if you want to try to keep track of who is who and how they relate to the other characters in each separate story. Sometimes it is family, but often it is a neighbour or work-only connection. show less

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this novel is how readable it is. I found myself having to ration out the books so that I wouldn't consume it in a single sitting.

Yet this isn't page-turning in the conventional sense. There's no complex and clever plot to unravel, no sense of threat or intrigue to tease yourself with page after page. There as just life as we all live it.

What makes it compelling is not that I want to know what happens next but I want to know these people and, in the process, I want to know more about how their experiences mirror mine.

In each chapter, I get to walk a mile in someone else's shoes. It's not a first-person experience but rather a guided tour with the authorial voice capturing every emotion, memory and show more reaction with an empathy so deep you could drown in it.

The book opens with an eighty-three-year-old man driving into town to buy his wife a birthday present and then stopping in on a neighbour on his way home. That's it as far as action goes yet during this ride I found out about the events that shaped this man's life, about his beliefs and his hopes, about his attachment to the bright but fearful and isolated Lucy Barton who was once a student at the school he was a janitor in and who now lives in New York City and is a writer of well-known books. I come to understand his ability to "live through" disaster, his impulse to help others and the relationship he believes he has with God.

There's a whole novel, just in that one chapter. Each of the other eight chapters is like that, sweeping me along not just in someone's story but in their current experience and choices. Each chapter focuses on someone who was in the supporting cast of characters when Lucy Barton was recalling her childhood in *My Name Is Lucy Barton", In "Anything Is Possible", each of them gets to be centre-stage for a while, the prime mover in their own universe. Each universe exercises a gravitational pull on at least one of the other universes in the book.

Each of the nine chapters could be seen as the free-standing short story describing how an individual sees the world, but we're being offered more than a quilt of nine squares here. This is a novel with a consistent authorial voice, leading us through the thoughts and emotions of the characters in the story and in the process, highlighting the themes that connect them and all of us as we try to live our lives.

I see this novel as a three-dimensional piece of art that, although the eye first reads it from left to right, becomes something non-linear: a set of lens viewing a common space but from different angles and different focal lengths. From their different perspectives, the chapters describe a central space, that we all recognise and share but can rarely regard clearly because we are so tangled up in our own story. It's a place where our hope, shame, anger, love, compassion and desires meet.

That all sounds rather complicated and perhaps a little dry but the experience of reading the book is one of easy access to sometimes painfully accurate experiences that resonate as real. Each room in the house is welcoming and built on a human scale. The true nature of the architecture only dawns on you later.

This is a book that, as one of the characters says of Lucy Barton's novel, "made her feel understood and less alone". There are big themes here but I believe the main one is that, while all our lives are unique, we do not have to be alone if we are prepared to forgive ourselves and others.

One of the themes of the book is the nature of love. One character sums it up by saying:

We’re all just a mess, Angelina, trying as hard we can. We love imperfectly, Angelina, and it’s ok.

One of my favourite characters, the youngest of the Pretty Nicely sisters, now sometimes called Fatty Patty by the children at the school she works in, understands that empathy is difficult because we are too self-absorbed to make space for it:

Everyone,she understood, was mainly and mostly interested in themselves.

She also understands that love is what breaks down the walls of our isolation and allows us to be better. She refers to it as a protective skin:

This was the skin that protected you from the world, this loving of another person you shared your life with.

The characters show us that we all love imperfectly BUT that it is still possible to choose our own path, to change the plot of our own story and to influence the stories of others:

One of the things that occupy that central space that the stories share is how our past shapes us. In the final chapter, the main character, once poor and now rich, is puzzled by the power of his past to shape his present:

"What puzzled Able about life was how much one forgot but then live with anyway, like a phantom limb"

In these stories, shame plays a huge part in shaping people's perception of themselves and others. Shame walks hand in hand with attitudes to class. Both create ostracism, disempowerment, unkindness, and derision. The make some people less real than others. They erode self-worth and foster abuse.

Violence, whether we commit it or are on the receiving end of it, also leaves permanent scare, whether it's PTSD from acts committed during a war on being subject to violent abuse throughout childhood.

I found one of the hardest chapters to experience was the one where Lucy Barton comes home and meets with her brother and her sisters in the tiny house they all suffered through their childhood in. The present pain caused by past abuse is almost unbearable. When the talk turns to the terrible things their parents did, Lucy cries out in denial and says "It wasn't that bad", all the while knowing that it was.

This is one of a number of examples that show how hard it is for us to see clearly, to remember honestly (or at all), and to focus on the important choices in our lives.

The message I took away from the book is that living through things we don't is unavoidable. Life cannot be pain-free. We live and love imperfectly. We drag our past after us. Compassion, forgiveness and kindness are the best salves available to us.

I think this book will become a classic. I highly recommend it.

If you'd like to get an insight into what Elizabeth Strout thinks of her novel, read the interviews below.

Seattle Times article "Talking to author Elizabeth Strout about her new novel, ‘Anything Is Possible" where Elizabeth Strout explains how she wrote the book and comments on some of the themes in it.

Interview with Penguin Books where she talks about her hope that her books will make people feel less alone.

I listened to the audiobook, which was perfectly performed by Kimberly Farr. Click on the SoundCloud link below to listen to a sample of her performance.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/319870206" params="color=#ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /] show less

52. Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
published: 2017
format: 245-page Kindle ebook
acquired: October 13 read: Oct 13 – Nov 7 time reading: 6:03, 1.4 mpp
rating: 3½
genre/style: Contemporary Fiction theme: Booker 2022
locations: Amgash, Illinois and a few other places
about the author: born in Maine, 1956.

The second in the Amgash quartet. I'm working toward the 3rd, [Oh, William], on the Booker 2022 longlist.

Well, this wasn‘t anywhere near as strong to me as [My Name is Lucy Barton] (the first book in the quartet). Strout basically fleshes out all the stories told in MNiLB between Lucy and her mother. So this is a short story collection, all 3rd person narrative, linked but really each story is independent, with limited character show more overlap. Strout does this contrast where generally normal people do or get involved in really out-there non-normal stuff. I found it very readable but also I found it a bit much, and that left a little bit of an aftertaste with me.

It has led me to appreciate [My Name is Lucy Barton] more. Lucy is relatable and has a powerful voice. And she‘s developed, the narrative is compressed and maintained, every word in that book has a purpose. Nothing wasted. And I loved the Lucy talking to me in that book. All this is missing here, in book 2, by design.

2022
https://www.librarything.com/topic/345047#7976977 show less

There's no way that I can write anything that accurately sums up my reaction to Elizabeth Strout's new book, Anything is Possible. In form, it's most closely related to Olive Kitteridge, being a collection of closely related short stories about people from Amgash, the small town where the protagonist of Strout's previous novel, My Name is Lucy Barton grew up. Amgash is a struggling agricultural community, whose residents work as high school guidance counselors, janitors, nurse's aides and housewives. Those who leave enjoy broader prospects, but are nonetheless shaped by the town they grew up in. Lucy Barton's existence hangs over the town; she's a success story, but the residents are ashamed of how she and her family were ostracized and show more of the bleak poverty that clung to them.

Each story stands on its own, but is made richer by being situated with other stories about the same place, with central characters from one story being mentioned in another. I'm a sucker for the interconnected short story format, and I'm a fan of Strout's understated but fine writing, but I'm pretty sure this book is very, very good. show less