The ambition and accomplishments of Strout's Olive, Again

In the end, we see that it is Olive Kitteridges's role thoughout Elizabeth Strout's Oive, Again (2019) to cut through all the crap and obfuscations and to get to get to the heart of everyone's story, her own included. Virtually every character in this novel, and in this fictional town of Crosby, Maine (correct name, which I got wrong in some previous posts), has a tragic history - suicide, madness, fatal accidents, infidelity, for some examples - that nobody discusses (though everybody seems to know, at least as a piece of gossip); most of the children of the "next" generation - Olive's son and his cohort - have moved to big cities, NY or Boston for the most part, and come back hoe if at all only to deal w/ family crises. Olive is in a sense a novelist in that she elicits the stories of the lives of others and, on occasion - in fact in some of the best stories in this collection - comes to realization about the failures in her own life, most notably her failure as a mother (see the story about her son's first visit to see her in 3 years). This is maybe not a great work of fiction, but it's at least a very good one - largely because of Olive's character and characteristics, though if I read one more "Godfrey" or "Yup" I would have screamed; most of the stories are narrated through extensive dialog, so the novel is like a retrospective on lives led rather than a dramatic presentation of powerful scenes, w/ a few exceptions - most notably to me in the aforementioned son's-visit story and in the scene in the nursing home where O's friend engages in an imagined dialog w/ the long-deceased mother. I never quite bought into the character of 2nd-husband, Jack, who in no way seems like a retired academic, let alone the youngest person every to receive tenure at Harvard - but that's a quibble. There's much power in these stories of loss and sorrow, there's some redemption toward the end - who wouldn't like Olive's defense of the weak and oppressed, particularly the Somaili exiles now populating rural Maine (though I don't know why ES would go out of her way to take pot shots at "President" Trump - I despise him as well, but those comments seem self-congratulatory and smug - not a way to make others see things from Olive's and Strout's POV) - even if the turnaround in her relationship w/ her son seems ungrounded. Strout is an extremely popular novelist - she seems to have picked up where Anne Tyler left off in the 90s or so - and this novel gives us updates on characters from throughout her writing career, not Olive only but also the Burgess Bros. and Amy and Isabel, maybe others. Quite an accomplishment - but where do you go from here?