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"Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors"--Amazon.com.… (more)
I expect I'll be the odd one out on this book. While I see glowing accolates and many 4.5 and 5 star reviews, I just had a hard time connecting with it. I cannot put my finger on the exact reason. Strout's [b:My Name Is Lucy Barton|25893709|My Name Is Lucy Barton|Elizabeth Strout|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1450653428s/25893709.jpg|45584499] was extraordinary, and this book is written in a similar vein. Strout takes us to Lucy's hometown where we meet people from her past as well as her siblings. Every person is so completely *human* -- flawed, imperfect, and in this book, profoundly sad (perhaps that was my issue. Right book, wrong time. Perhaps I just couldn't handle the deep melancholy that pervades the book right now).
Strout is one of America's best living writers, but I found myself avoiding this book rather than savoring it.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )
rabck from rubyrebel; Short stories, all set in or related to Amgash, Illinois. with the people in each kind of strung together due to current events or their childhood. Then title comes from the ending of Abel Blaine's story - "Anything is Possible" he thinks as he's rushed off to the hospital after suffering another heart attack. ( )
I haven't read 'My Name is Lucy Barton', but I sense this may not matter. Lucy features in this short story collection, as does her home town and community of Amgash, Illinois. Each story here features someone in the locality, and is at least loosely connected with one of more of the other characters. All of them are in some way damaged and flawed, and that this became something of a theme gave the book a certain greyness, a certain predictability. I've been a week getting round to writing this review, and I find I have little recall of the stories in this book. It's well written: Strout has an eye for the telling detail, and an ear for conversation. But I'm now in no hurry to read 'My Name is Lucy Barton'. ( )
A fine collection of short stories featuring characters mentioned in Strout’s novel My Name is Lucy Barton. Beautifully written and, for me, far more engaging than the novel as the stories are more unexpected and wonderfully varied. As well as tenderness and humour, Strout can maintain tension in these seemingly simple stories, just because you as a reader are unsure where Strout wants to take you. For example, the final story about Abel Blaine (Lucy Barton’s cousin) should (you think) mirror the goodwill of the play of a Dickensian A Christmas Carol, but in about 30 pages Strout creates multiple ways in which the story might develop. ( )
"The Barton family had been outcasts, even in a town like Amgash, their extreme poverty and strangeness making this so. The oldest child, a man named Pete, lived alone there now, the middle child was two towns away, and the youngest, Lucy Barton, had fled many years ago, and had ended up living in New York City."
Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible is a lovely collection of nine stories revolving around characters mentioned in her novel My Name is Lucy Barton. These interrelated stories are set in the small run-down town of Amgash, Illinois, Lucy Barton’s hometown. Though many of the characters have moved on from Amgash the events in their past have left an indelible mark on their lives and as they recall significant memories they are all taken back to their life in Amgash. Most of the characters will sound familiar on account of them being mentioned in the conversations between Lucy and her mother in the previous novel. Only one of the stories, Sister, features Lucy Barton and her siblings as the main characters but we get to know more about Lucy’s townspeople such as Vietnam War veteran Charlie Macauley ( The Hit-Thumb Theory), the Nicely family (Windmills) and the Mumford family( Mississippi Mary), her school janitor, Tommy Guptill ( The Sign), and her cousins, Abel Blaine (Gift) and Dottie (Dottie’s Bed and Breakfast. As we learn more about the lives, relationships, backstories and struggles of some of the past and present residents of Amgash, each of their stories contributes to a better understanding of Lucy Barton and her story.
Elizabeth Strout’s writing is elegant, her characters are real and relatable and her prose is beautiful and the narrative flows smoothly. The structure and style of this collection are similar to the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge. Though many of these stories are heartbreaking and revolve around unhappy moments and memories, touching upon themes such as poverty, parental neglect, PTSD, infidelity and trauma, the author writes with compassion and a great understanding of human emotions and complex relationships.
I strongly recommend reading My Name is Lucy Barton before this collection of stories to understand how and where these stories connect to Lucy and her story. ( )
The crap of class superiority would protect no man for long. Many lived whole lives and never knew this; Charlie did.
Inadvertently he glanced at himself in the mirror. He had long ago stopped looking like anyone familiar.
He felt the itch of desire that was carnal, corporeal; it included much and was not a stranger to him.
People could surprise you. Not just their kindness, but also their sudden ability to express things the right way.
And because he was Charlie, who years ago had fouled himself profoundly, because he was Charlie and not someone else, he could not say to his son: You are decent and strong, and none of this has anything to do with me; but you came through it, that childhood that wasn't all roses, and I'm proud of you, I'm amazed by you. Charlie could not even say a watered-down version of whatever that feeling would be. He could not even clap his son on the shoulder in greeting, or when saying goodbye.
It occurred to him often that many did not have echoes of pain from the silent noises he carried in his head.
You never get used to pain, no matter what anyone says about it.
Shelly Small had been raised to speak about herself as though she was the most interesting thing in the world. Listening to her, Dottie almost admired this.
To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.
Weather was different then, like a family member you couldn't avoid.
Annie had never been scared of her father the way Charlene was scared of hers. And Annie wasn't scared of her mother, who was the cozier parent but not the more important one.
She felt this more than she thought it, the way children do.
Her grandmother said, "Don't come back. Don't get married. Don't have children. All those things will bring you heartache."
All this fell into Jamie's stomach with the silence of a stone falling into the darkness of a well.
What Annie did not say was that there were many ways of not knowing things; her own experience over the years now spread like a piece of knitting in her lap with different colored yarns—some dark—all through it.
But she had many friends, and they had their disappointments too, and nights and days were spent giving support and being supported; the theater world was a cult, Annie thought. It took care of its own even while it hurt you.
their own universe and its wild recent unmooring were all that mattered now.
inside him was a tiny gasp at the ungraspable concept of time going by.
A thought came to Abel like a bat that swooped from the eaves
Abel could feel fear rising around him like dark water.
Already in the darkness people were trying to scramble to the aisle, some flipping on cellphones for the light, so that wrists and cuffs were illuminated in what seemed to be disembodied flickers of an ectoplasmic presence.
He remembered how earlier he'd thought of people reciting a line, and he understood now that he was one of them.
Fatigue was like a piece of cloth covering him.
"I wanted to talk to a person, and here you are a real person, you have no idea how hard it is—to find a real person."
When word came that Keith had died of cancer, Abel was astonished. That astonishment had to do with death, with the wiping out of a person, with the puzzlement that the man was simply gone.
The Sign: 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.
Windmills: This was the skin that protected you from the world -- this loving of another person you shared your life with.
Snow-Blind: They had grown up on shame; it was the nutrient of their soil. Yet, oddly, it was her father she felt she understood the best. And for a moment Annie wondered at this, that her brother and sister, good, responsible, decent, fair-minded, had never known the passion that caused a person to risk everything they held dear heedlessly put in danger -- simply to be near the white dazzle of the sun that somehow for those moments seemed to leave the earth behind.
Gift: What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway -- like phantom limbs, he supposed.
Last words
And if such a gift could come to him at such a time, then anything---dear girl from Rockford dressed up for her meeting, rushing above the Rock River---he opened his eyes, and yes, there it was, the perfect knowledge: Anything was possible for anyone.
"Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors"--Amazon.com.
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by #1 bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.
Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others.
Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence.
Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors.
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Strout is one of America's best living writers, but I found myself avoiding this book rather than savoring it.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review. (