Book Notes: Tell Me Everything

Sometimes an author manages to actually fingerprint life onto the pages of a book, and such is the case in Elizabeth Strout's Tell Me Everything.

Human, human, human—that's what this book is. (Simultaneously a depiction of why the nuance-lacking tool that is AI simply isn't coming for our literature.)

Great character development involves the ability to reflect us humans as the flawed, beautiful, weirdly aware-of-ourselves and simultaneously not-aware-of-ourselves creatures that we are.To adeptly illustrate the layers (or, nodding to Whitman, multitudes) that we contain.

Between how we act and how we feel.

Between what we say and what we mean. 

That ever-present hum of life force that moves like a river within and through us all.

This is a book that readers get to inhabit.

Yes, there's a bit of a murder mystery; there's a growing love between two married people. 

But most of the "action" in these pages is non-action—it's walks along a river and living room visits and people bumping into each other, and into each other agin.

Yet, deftly, Tell Me Everything manages both ask and answer one of the biggest questions of all: "what does it all mean?"