MADreads

Teachers young and old

April 20th, 2009 Mary K. - Central

One of the many joys of the Wisconsin Book Festival is the opportunity to hear authors that even avid readers might not be familiar with.  I attended a reading with Tom Perrotta (The Abstinence Teacher, reviewed earlier on MADreads), Elizabeth Strout, and Sarah Shun-Lien Byum (also reviewed earlier on MADreads).

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout has been getting a lot of attention, and is deservedly showing up many of the “best of” 2008  book lists.  The teacher in her book is retired, but she still is a person of importance in her small home town in Maine.  The stories look at her past, and that of her husband and son.  These are complex stories, all linked in some way with characters that reappear, so although these are technically short stories, the book reads more like a novel and there is more time to develop each character.

Strout writes beautifully and each story delves deeply into various life experiences.  Olive seems to be a difficult and somewhat opinionated woman, but we also see her humanity and come to understand how she became the person she is.  I expected to dislike her but it is not long before she becomes a very sympathtic character, as her strength and flaws are revealed.

Sarah Shun-Lien Byum’s Ms. Beatrice Hempel of the Ms. Hempel Chronicles is a young middle school English teacher, still finding her way in life as an adult and as an authority figure.  Although she feels uncertain at times, her students clearly like her and relate to her in ways that they would not with an older more experienced teacher.  It would be hard to imagine Olive Kitteridge behaving the same way in a classroom.

These stories are also interconnected, with a collection of individual scenes and vignettes.  Some are amusing, for example, Ms. Hempel assigns This Boy’s Life to the 7th graders.  Tobias Wolff stole school stationary and wrote letters about himself under teacher’s names in order to get into college.  Ms Hempel’s assignment to her students to write about themselves on their school stationary has some interesting results.  There is a very poignant last chapter set several years later when Ms. Hempel has a chance encounter with one of her students.

These are two excellent short story collections from two strong writers, and even those who rarely read short stories or don’t usually like them, will find much to admire in these books.

Entry Filed under: Literary Fiction, Short Stories