Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the third novel by Elizabeth Strout that I read and, chronologically, the second book by the author, published in 2006. I loved both Olive Kitteridge (2008) and My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016) and rated them with a solid four stars. Abide with Me is a very good novel too, but, for me, not quite on the same level.

The plot is set in 1959, in a small New England town. Several years earlier, young Reverend Tyler Caskey was appointed as a minister of the town parish. After a few happy years, he has recently been dealing with huge personal loss while trying to help his parishioners not only with strengthening their Christian faith but also with their personal problems.

The novel shows why it is difficult to be a human. It is about the central aspects of our humanness: about loss, about our personal weaknesses, about our failures, and about differences between our ambitions and expectations and the actual reality that ensues as a consequence of our actions. The book is yet another example of how literary fiction, created by a skillful author, conveys truth about people much better than a nonfiction account ever could. The writing is beautiful, as usual for Ms. Strout: the prose is clear, simple, and economical.

It is worth noting that—while the main focus of the plot is on characters' tribulations—the signs of a tense political situation keep popping up in the background: mentions of Mr. Khrushchev, nuclear weapons, building anti-atomic shelters, etc.

It was a hard decision, but, for me, Abide with Me does not rise to the four-star level. First of all, in my view, the ending does not match the tone and the mood of the rest of the book. Otherwise, and this is totally subjective, I did not experience the feeling of awe about the novel, one that I clearly felt about the other two books by Ms. Strout.

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