Very Down East

Amy and Isabelle is apparently Elizabeth Strout's first novel. I've read two others by her, both pretty much going over the same native soil: depressed people in a depressed town in a wintry landscape on the coast of Maine. It's not really my favorite fiction territory, but the books are saved by some sharp writing and occasional flareups of tension and existential angst. Amy and Isabelle looks, from first chapter, to be of a piece with the others, though maybe a bit more carefully crafted and conventional in structure. First chapter introduces the eponymous mother and daughter who, during a sweltering summer (a break from Maine convention there) work together in the office of a mill (ca 1975 - a sense of doom hangs over the whole enterprise). Neither A nor I seems particularly attractive or interesting, and their coworkers even less so, so you wonder how Strout will sustain this for 300 or so pages, but she is a careful craftswoman and meticulously build the character and the setting through shrewd observations and detail: cooking hamburgers for dinner in the terrible heat, the awkward silences of the dinner, the mother (Isabelle's) strained attempts at conversation, he inner thoughts about how she actually does not like Amy (though she remembers her as a lovable youth - Amy is now about 17), all seem true and believable, though not comfortable or pleasant. It's going to be a very flinty and difficult story, we realize, as we settle into it. The first chapter ends with a bit of a firecracker, as Amy tells her mother (would she really?) that one of her friends is pregnant.