Olive Kitteridge is a big woman: she is described thus many times throughout the short story collection/novel hybrid that is "Olive Kitteridge," which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Olive lives in the tiny waterfront town of Crosby, Maine, with a population so small that everyone knows everyone else and their business; where people tend to do what is expected of them--raise a family, settle down with steady jobs, and limit their aspirations to the boundaries of the town.
In her inability to feel content with her life, with the "blackness" that accompanies her through her household tasks and is often expressed through anger and even cruelty, Olive seems, in a way, to be too big for the town that has always been her home. It seems clear that her marriage, like most of the marriages in Crosby, was determined by the limited number of choices available in the town, when she was too young to understand the consequences. Yet such is the narrowness of her experience that Olive seems utterly unaware of her own rage--or at least of its source--and it is this tension between the character and her surroundings, as well as within herself, that is at least a part of what makes "Olive Kitteridge" so compelling--nearly impossible to put down. Yet I did succeed in putting the book down, on many occasions, because I wanted it to last.
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