Bob Burgess, another of Strout’s familiar characters, has returned to Crosby and is now married to Margaret, a Unitarian minister who is having a tough time with some of her congregation. Margaret is an admirable woman, but she doesn’t have the capacity of Lucy Barton to allow Bob to just talk. One of the threads of the story concerns Bob’s growing reliance on Lucy and slow drift away from his second marriage. Lucy and Bob discuss things like the nature of envy and whether their country is headed for civil war. “Bob felt again that just to be in the company of Lucy gave him a respite from everything.” For Margaret, conversation exists mostly to get things done. Bob’s first wife, Pam, for whom he still carries a torch, is an alcoholic.
No plot summary will do justice to Strout’s keen observation of small gestures and the way the featherweight of words can tip the scales of a life. Much of the action in this book coalesces around the story of Matthew Beach, an eccentric artist who lives on an isolated road in the back woods. He is accused of the murder of his 87-year-old mother, Gloria, whose body is located in a disused quarry about two hours away.
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Bob Burgess, a lawyer, doesn’t have much enthusiasm about defending Matt. He is supposed to be slowing down, after all. But unlike his go-getter brother, Jim, Bob Burgess has a soft spot for people who carry a burden. Bob spent most of his life believing that he was to blame for the death of his father. It turns out that Jim was responsible but allowed his younger brother to carry the burden.
All these lives are a mess of unacknowledged emotion, intricately woven into a delicate tissue of truth-telling. Tell Me Everything is a great title for a book that draws its characters into an acceptance of their reality by creating structures in which they can talk about the wear and tear of life. Strout builds a unique world which is all the more relatable because of that. You can never waste time in her company.
