Maine lines - Strout's novel

Stepping back in to Elizabeth Strout's The Burgess Boys, which I'd put aside for two weeks of travel - finding the novel easy to pick up again, as she has a very straightfoward and fluid style - but as one might expect I have to keep reminding myself about the relationships among the characters, all of whom bear maddeningly simple names - Tom, Bob, Helen, Sue, et al. At times it feels as if Strout is churning through the plot - she has many elements, settings, and relationships to develop in a fiarly complex story line that is seeming to center on a young man who committed an act of racial hatred against the Somali-Muslim community burgeoning in his small Maine town and the efforts of his two uncles, both New York lawyers, to defend him or secure him a good defense. This conflict will obviously pit the Burgess bros against one another, as Bob is clearly developing a sympathy for the Somali community and Tom, the more successful older brother, is just a plain aggressive win-at-all-costs attorney - or so it seems. I wish Strout would ease up on the plot and just develop her scenes a little more lovingly - I don't have in my mind a very clear picture of the Maine village (or of the Brooklyn neighborhood where the brothers live) other than what I brought to the novel. My memory of reading previous Strout novels tells me she can be quite good at delineating scenes, with her particular interest in the non-tourist side of coastal Maine, but in this novel she's rushing headlong into the story and her descriptions are pretty much pro forma, devoid of striking detail.