Having read six of Strout’s books and being well acquainted with her characters in Crosby and Shirley Falls, Maine, I was looking forward to reading “Tell Me Everything.  I was not disappointed.

In her own unique style, the narrator (who occasionally turns to the reader with a reminder, a question, or a side comment) tells the remarkable stories of unremarkable people living in a small town in today’s America.  There are references to the current political situation (Lucy: ” I think this country is headed to a civil war.”), but the focus is almost totally on the details and life stories of those Strout refers to as “unrecorded lives”.

Olive appears once again as does Lucy Barton, her ex-husband, William, and front and center, Bob Burgess, his wife Margaret, the minister at the local church, his ex-wife Pam, and his brother, Jim and Jim’s wife, Helen and son Larry.  A mystery story winds its way through all of these lives in the persons of Gloria Beach and her children Diana, Tom, and Matt when Gloria disappears and is later found in a rental car submerged in a nearby quarry.

The plot is secondary to the characters, and they provide ample commentary on the human condition—“we are all so alone”; “People are mysteries. We are all such mysteries.”;”…everyone is broken in some way.”;”People suffer.  They live, they hope, they even have love, and they still suffer. Everyone does.”  This is strong stuff delivered in a low key, ‘oh, by the way’ set of conversations between Lucy and Bob, Bob and Margaret, Bob and Matt, and others.

The bottom line for Strout is one of Bob’s comments when on leaving Lucy one day he thinks to himself: “That’s just how it is, that’s all.  He thought: God, we are all so alone.”  Strout is not a beaming optimist, thank goodness, but a very talented writer who has settled on an unremarkable small town with its unremarkable set of citizens to comment on the universal human condition.

This book passed my ‘sniff test’, i.e. I was eager to rush back to it whenever I was away.  I highly recommend it.