As an inveterate eavesdropper, one who likes to eat breakfast or lunch alone in restaurants while hiding behind a book, I hear some good stuff.
The trick is to practice self-control. To know when to stop listening. When you overhear a particularly good line, time to bail. Whatever follows rarely delivers the promise hinted at by the first sentence.
Recent exception to this rule: Sunny window booth in the pleasantly shabby Cup & Saucer Cafe in Portland’s Hawthorne neighborhood. Hevuos Rancheros, hold the sour cream. Several pages into “Olive Kitteridge” by Elizabeth Strout.
The man sitting in the booth behind me says this:
“I had some dreams last night I wasn’t happy with.”
Now, admit it. When a companion begins a sentence about a recent dream, your heart sinks, doesn’t it? Dream narratives are second in tedium only to looking through photos of someone’s trip to the Holy Land. (If something Messianic happens, I’ll catch it on YouTube, thanks.) But this sentence made me want to set the fork and book down, turn around and ask him exactly what he meant.
Alas, the waiter appeared with the couple’s check, she remembered they were due elsewhere, and his next paragraph went out the door with them. Drat.
“Olive Kitteridge,” by the way, is a very, very good book, richly deserving of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize it won for fiction. Thirteen essays about small-town folks, all connected through the title character. Olive is an intelligent, cantankerous, retired math teacher who sees life around her in Crosby, Maine, in sharp–if dark–relief. She was a bad mother, a harsh wife, a scary teacher and now she’s a disgruntled retiree. It’s Strout’s genius that makes us cheer for Olive in spite of all these flaws.
The novel is largely about connections, especially long marriages, and the way they change over time. Strout loves exploring new friendships that sprout in old age. When two of her senior characters begin to get close, they talk of their favorite things:
“She told him about the morning she took a pear from the front yard of Mrs. Kettleworth, and her mother made her take it back, how embarrassed she’d been. He told her about finding the quarter in the mud puddle…She told him her favorite song was “Whenever I Feel Afraid”…He said the first time he heard Elvis on the radio singing “Fools Rush In,” it made him feel like he and Elvis were friends.”
Two gifts in one morning; this engrossing book and the tantalizing, unfinished thought of the dreamer in the next booth. The eggs were good too.
