Book #55: Abide with Me

Title: Abide with Me
Author: Elizabeth Strout

I loved Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge, which I read earlier this year, and was eager to get my hands on Elizabeth Strout's other books. Abide with Me takes place in the same small town in Maine where Amy and Isabelle (another Strout novel) is set, and centers on Tyler Caskey, a young minister whose family has been upended by the death of his wife. His baby daughter now lives with his domineering mother, his other daughter is at home with him, but has problems he feels unequipped to handle. And to make matters worse, his church community, who welcomed him with open arms only six years ago, seems eager to find fault with him, even if it's just so they have something exciting to talk about.

There were a lot of things I really liked about Abide with Me. Strout's prose is beautiful, and I loved the way they tied the hymn of the same title through the book. Caskey is also a rich, complex character, and Strout does a great job of showing how grief can be complicated, especially when tragedy befalls someone who wasn't always all that easy to love. In other ways, the book felt like something I'd read before. It reminded me a lot, in fact, of Tova Mirvis's The Ladies Auxiliary, in which a religious community doesn't know what to do with an outsider with a small child whose spouse recently died. The judgmental chit-chat of the women of the congregation was something I could both identify with (she talks at one point about a rush of excitement one of the people felt when they gossiped in the name of "helping") and something that felt a bit reductive.