Some avert their gaze because they think it’s not their place to do anything. Strout’s characters here are all complicit in one way or another. When it happens in a small town, it becomes inherently more personal, and thus for a novel, more dramatic. When a child is abused in a city and no one does anything, we think of the bystander effect, of systemic failure. Or maybe the limited scope can enhance a book in an important way.Īfter all, Strout’s books are not just built upon small towns, they’re drawn to themes that a small town heightens, intensifies. Over the course of a book, maybe a small town can be known in a way that would be more difficult for a city. Perhaps this is because a small town can be used as a central character in a way that it’s difficult for a city, multifaceted and bursting with change, to be. But I’d bet that proportionately, a higher percentage of linked stories take place in rural spaces compared with traditional novels. Why are rural communities so often the target of linked story collections? It’s not the rule, of course there’s James Joyce’s Dubliners, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, or Stuart Dybek’s I Sailed With Magellan.

In Anything Is Possible’s case, Amgash is as much that central character as Lucy, following in the vein of books like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Annie Proulx’s Close Range, or John Grisham’s Ford County.

Last month, Strout published Anything Is Possible, a direct follow-up to My Name Is Lucy Barton that, like Olive Kitteridge, uses one central character as an anchor point and builds a web of stories around that character. While 2016’s My Name Is Lucy Barton takes place in New York City, the heart of the story, flashbacks and dialogue between Lucy and her mother, goes back to Lucy’s hometown of Amgash, Illinois. Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer in 2009, was set in the fictional Crosby, Maine, a town close enough where one person, the book’s titular character, could exert a gravitational pull on every other resident. Small-town America has been at the center of Elizabeth Strout’s work as a novelist.

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