TELL ME EVERYTHING by Elizabeth Strout; Random House, 2024; 324 pages, $29; ISBN 978-0-593-44609-6.

TELL ME EVERYTHING

About people, British writer Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) said: “I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.” Maine author Elizabeth Strout, however, does like people, but fans of her novels and her fascinating yet profoundly unhappy characters may ask, why?

Strout is a best-selling author (New York Times) and Pulitzer Prize winner for her 2008 novel, “Olive Kitteridge.” This is her 10th novel, and features three of the major characters in the earlier novels to refreshingly good effect. If a reader hasn’t read Strout before, it might be helpful to first read about Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton and Bob Burgess to fully appreciate her perceptive character development.

Here Strout’s main characters are older, but not much wiser, still grappling with discontent and unfulfilled lives. Olive is 90 years old, living in a retirement home, is as mean as ever, a judgmental gossip with just one friend (no surprise). She is determined to tell Lucy, a well-known writer, of other people’s “unrecorded” lives, relishing in people’s weaknesses.

Patient Lucy and kindhearted Bob, a local lawyer, are good friends who spend a lot of time together talking and sharing, but denying their real feelings. Her ex-husband and his ambitious wife are in the picture, too, but not as you might think. When a local, middle-aged man is accused of murdering his mother, Bob defends the guileless man, and briefly finds a purpose in life.

Resentment, indecision and general unhappiness infect everyone, and Lucy nails it when she tells Bob: “People live their lives with no real knowledge of anybody.” As the characters interact in close, personal and intimate ways, readers will see them for what they are even if the characters themselves do not. And Strout makes us wonder: Does anyone really control their own lives?

THE MAINE STANDARD: POETRY, PROSE, PHOTOGRAPHY, edited by Lisa Gardner Walsh; Down East Books, 2024; 128 pages, $19.95; ISBN 978-1-68475-114-3.

THE MAINE STANDARD: POETRY, PROSE, PHOTOGRAPHY

Maine is blessed with many talented poets, writers and photographers, men and women skilled at creating images, emotions, thoughts and feelings. Down East Books has captured these qualities in The Maine Standard,” the first book in a planned series of artistic mastery.

The editor, Lisa Gardner Walsh, has penned a dozen books and has put together a collection of 30 poems, nine photographs and 15 stories contributed by 26 Mainers, truly a wide variety of subjects, styles and messages. Poems cover expected subjects like stars, trees, birds and afternoon walks, but also the unexpected: doing the laundry, sitting at Logan Airport and roofing the woodshed. Most powerful is Shawne McCord’s beautiful poem, “Letter to My First Daughter.”

The stories tell of heartache, uncertainty, joy and humor in people’s lives. “Tidying Up” by Round Pond writer Ellen Baker tells of an unhappy woman on a hopeful romantic weekend in Maine that turns into an awful disappointment. In another story, a father tells of the fear he felt when his son was thought lost at sea. And it has an unexpected bittersweet ending.

The two best stories are hilarious. “Pink Cadillac” by Charlotte Crowder is a wonderful spoof of a Mary Kay cosmetics saleswoman getting her pink Cadillac stuck in Maine mud, rescued by a Ma and Pa Kettle-type Maine couple, and the couple’s generosity repaid with a laughable Mary Kay party with their reluctant neighbors (“Can’t wait to wash my face”).  The other funny story is pure Tim Sample, Maine’s premier humorist. With his typical self-deprecating humor, Tim tells of hard times as a young husband, and how his neighbor taught him a lesson he’ll never forget.

The photographs are all black and white, and present unusual images to absorb and figure out.

Bill Bushnell lives and writes in Harpswell.