‘Family is a goldmine for a novelist’: Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout, to speak in Dowagiac
DOWAGIAC, MI — Is Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, “The Burgess Boys” (2013, Random House), a look into family drama, or is it social commentary?
Is it about siblings with buried tensions, or a small town’s relationship with Somali immigrants after a clueless teen throws a pig head into a mosque?
Speaking from her home in New York City, Strout said it’s both, but it seems that some reviews and readers focus mainly on the family.
“I actually think all my books are about class and stuff as well, but this is a larger canvas, this last book.”
Strout, author of 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Olive Kitteridge” (soon to be an HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins and Bill Murray), will speak May 9 in Dowagiac. Her appearance is part of Dowagiac’s Dogwood Fine Arts Festival.
“If you’re writing truthfully about the human experience, there has to be some social commentary,” she said.
The novel’s inspiration was sparked by an actual incident in Strout’s home state and frequent setting in her fiction, Maine. In Lewiston, 2006, a pig head was thrown into a Somali mosque during prayers. It happened during tensions between residents and an influx of Somali immigrants.
Strout set the incident in her fictional town of Shirley Falls. “That was the first time I’d used something from real life,” she said. She turned the head-thrower into Zach, a 19-year-old who thought he was just playing a joke, not committing a hate crime. “It was novelistically more interesting to have someone unknowing, a little bit baffled, as opposed to just a skinhead racist.”
His mother calls in help from her brothers, Jim, a famed defense lawyer with political connections, and Bob, a liberal who works in legal aid. When they get together in their little hometown, conflicting personalities and tensions among the siblings mirror the tensions of the community.
Strout spent time researching and interviewing Maine’s Somali immigrants before writing the novel. Her interviews, and the following book tours, highlighted cultural misunderstandings.
On one book tour, “I was interviewed by a very pleasant man, and he said, ‘Well, they do think we’re the devils, don’t they? The Somalians?'” she said.
“I don’t think that they think we’re the devils. I think they might be confused as to why we need to consume so much, you know, but I don’t think they think we’re the devils,” she said, laughing.
The novel has been getting glowing reviews. “Her best yet… The novel has big things — race, religion, class, place — on its mind, and treats them seriously and swiftly. But the main reason ‘The Burgess Boys’ is a great novel is the way its characters think and speak,” The Boston Globe wrote.
Any engrossing story needs compelling, relatable characters, Strout obviously understands. “People relate to the family aspect much more than they relate to the Somali aspect of it,” she said. “Family is a goldmine for a novelist.”
An especially rich mine is the sibling relationship, Strout said. “There’s no other relationship like it. You’ve shared a past, but you haven’t necessarily shared the same past, even though you lived in the same house at the same time.”
Which is a little like the people of many cultures, races and religions in this country.
Elizabeth Strout; award-winning novelist, “terrible lawyer”:
She was born Jan. 6, 1956, in Portland, Maine. Grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire.
Siblings? One, an older brother, who is “really Maine, very taciturn. He does not talk. We have polite chit-chats,” she said.
Nothing in her family life matches her novel’s bickering siblings. “I thought to myself, ‘I wonder why I came up with these boys, because they really go at each other.’ The answer is, I don’t quite know.”
Brief law career: “I studied law, but I did that because I didn’t think I was going to earn a living as a writer,” she said.
But Strout knew she was a writer. “It’s more that I understood that I was a writer. It’s more accurate to say that it was a condition about myself that I had to learn to accept…. I kind of wanted to be normal, instead of being a writer. Because I assumed I’d be a failed writer, and I didn’t want to do that.”
So she became a lawyer, for a brief moment. “And I was a terrible lawyer for the three months I practiced. I was unspeakably bad at that! I realized, you know what? I’d better just go and fail as a writer because I’d rather really try to be a writer and fail — there’s nothing wrong with that — than be a terrible lawyer.”
2009 Pulitzer: She had no idea her novel “Olive Kitteridge” was in the running. Strout was on a lecture tour, with her phone off. She turned it on, and immediately heard from her angry agent. “Where have you been! I’ve been trying to get a hold of you. You won a Pulitzer!” Strout, in happy shock, kept repeating, “Are you sure?”
“Olive Kitteridge” mini-series coming to HBO later this year: Strout has been on the set to see her characters come to life. “That’s been surreal, and wonderful.” Frances McDormand (“Fargo,” “Moonrise Kingdom”), who plays the title role of a blunt and abrasive math teacher who gets involved her neighbors’ dramas, “has been very supportive,” Strout said.
In Dowagiac, Strout will talk about her “strong feelings about why we should be reading fiction, and why I’m writing it.”
Why fiction? “So that we don’t lose touch with those basic primitive emotions of what we feel, and what we’ve been told for many years that we don’t’ feel. Because my sense is that language is so misused so frequently, and that we try so hard to be civilized — which is not a bad thing — but we lose touch with those things that are actually quite human…. In a book we have the freedom to realize that we’re not the only people feeling them.”
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