The unveiling of ‘Paddock’s Picks’ begins with a mean math teacher

 

Editor’s note:  This is the first of what we at The City Wire hope is many more book reviews by Anita Paddock. Her reviews of books we should read are schedule to appear on the second and fourth Friday of each month. Enjoy.

review by Anita Paddock

When you were in high school, did it ever occur to you that your math teacher might have a life besides the one at the blackboard?

Elizabeth Strout in her 2009 Pulitzer prize winning novel, tells us about one such teacher in a small town in Maine. Olive Kitteridge, also the title of the book, is a tall, big boned, no nonsense math teacher who tries to run her household the way she runs her classroom, belittling everyone who doesn’t measure up to her standards. Her husband, Henry, a pharmacist, sees the good in everybody and wants everybody to be happy. He drives Olive crazy. And their sullen son, Christopher, doesn’t like either one of them.

The novel is told in a series of 13 separate stories in which Olive appears, sometimes only peripherally, and sometimes as the main character. The stories are not told chronologically, and it’s a testament to the author’s skill that the reader has no trouble following the stories as they appear on the page.

Olive, we learn as the book unfolds, has some demons in her past. Her father committed suicide, without leaving a note. Olive says, “Mother had such a hard time with that no-note business. She thought the least he could have done was left a note, the way he did when he went to the grocery store.”

Her husband naively claims to have had a wonderful childhood, even though his mother was committed to a hospital many times for a “nervous condition.” He yearns for a loving wife, fantasizes about leaving Olive to marry a young employee, but remains steadfast and true to a woman who refuses to attend church with him (but wants him to come home and tell her all the gossip he hears there.)

As Olive ages, she grows heavy, in part to her fixation on Dunkin Doughnuts. When lecturing a young girl who is obviously anorexic, she explains that the girl doesn’t eat because she’s starved for love. Olive says she eats because she, too, is starved for love.

At the end of the novel, after Henry has died and Christopher has moved to California to settle into a second marriage and get away from his mother, Olive is left alone. She meets a man her age, who is also estranged from his only child. They have a few pleasant evenings together until she finds out he is a rich Republican, and she will never have a thing to do with a man who voted for Bush. Either one.

Does Olive ever wise up and shut up? Read the book to find out.

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Thinking it would be fun to find out what a retired math teacher from this area is reading, Liz Haupert was contacted. Haupert taught math at Northside High School from 1981 until her retirement in 1999. She is reading Thomas Cahill’s “Hinges of History” series concerning history, politics, sociology, and faith of Western Civilization. For fun, she’s reading “The Piano Shop on the Left Bank,” a book recommended by a friend, Dan Roebuck.

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