Book Review: Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout – a welcome return to the world of Bob Burgess

The Burgess Boys was the first novel by Elizabeth Strout I ever read. I was soon a fan of Strout’s particular way of storytelling, never missing a book since and catching up with Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton and co, the small towns of Amgash Illinois, or as with this book, Crosby, Maine.

But I never forgot the wonderful character of Bob Burgess, the self-deprecating legal-aid lawyer, working the cases that don’t bring in a fat pay-cheque. He’s got plenty of history with his well-to-do, more confident brother, Jim – another lawyer and winner of a famous case people still talk about.

In Tell Me Everything, we catch up with Bob, who in the previous Lucy Barton book (Lucy by the Sea) has become Lucy’s friend. They take walks most days together, Bob having a furtive cigarette. Our other Elizabeth Strout character of note, Olive Kitteridge also enters the plot, having a story she wants to share with Lucy. Bob brings Lucy to visit the elderly Olive in her care facility, and Olive immediately detects that Bob is in love with Lucy. This is awkward, as Bob is married to Margaret, a church minister, and Lucy has settled in Crosby with her ex-husband William.

Lucy is a famous author, though a quietly unassuming one. Olive finds her a bit mousey but the two soon get along well, sharing stories of ordinary folk. They’re often rather sad stories, but the two feel they are worthy of sharing, as being otherwise undocumented lives. I feel this is Elizabeth Strout’s goal too – to write about ordinary folk, their burdens and their hopes, their failures and secrets, as well as the talents they don’t know they have. Some are more ordinary than others.

When elderly Gloria Beach goes missing from Shirley Falls, suspicion lands on her son Matthew, a strange, shy, reclusive man who has always lived with his mother. Bob finds himself reluctantly agreeing to defend Matthew against what seems to be an imminent charge of murder. Again, what is on the surface hides a grim set of family secrets, “lives of quiet desperation” indeed. So Bob has a lot going on with the legal case and his feelings for Lucy. A terrible illness in his brother’s family throws more light onto his relationship with Jim and events from the past.

Forty-five minutes away on the same morning that Susan was reading about Gloria Beach in the Shirley Falls newspaper, here, in the smaller town of Crosby, Bob was having a cigarette. It was a windy day with muted sunlight that was trying to press through the cloud covering, and Bob was standing beside his car in the back parking lot of that same old inn that had gone bankrupt and had vines growing over its windows. Last night his wife had sniffed his shoulder and said, “Bob? Don’t tell me you’re doing that again. Please don’t tell me you are smoking again.”
And he had lied!
He had lied.
Now Bob thought, Keep moving, so that the smoke wouldn’t stick to him, although the wind seemed to twirl itself around and not go in one direction. As he took a step forward, his phone in his pocket started to ring and he stepped right into the smoke he had just exhaled, and he thought, You idiot. Meaning himself.

Poor old Bob. He’s such a nice guy but gets caught up in everyone else’s troubles. He’s what Lucy calls a “sin-eater” – he seems more ministerial than his wife, Margaret, who he’s beginning to have some doubts about. On top of everything else, Margaret is having a difficult time with a partitioner.

I rattled through Tell Me Everything, particularly interested in the murder case and wanting to find out what had happened. But there’s nothing sensational here, it’s all very much like real life, another tragedy in an already tragic family. How Bob spots what happened and deals with it reveals an astuteness that is easily hidden within his seeming ordinariness.

Tell Me Everything is another terrific addition to the canon of novels about characters I have come to care about. They’re so realistic with their good points and bad, but Olive, Lucy and Bob are all people who take an interest in the lives of others, even people they hardly know. The stories of these people that come to the surface are often somewhat bleak, heartbreaking even, but they’re nonetheless fascinating. Tell Me Everything‘s a four-and-a-half-star read from me.