by Elizabeth Strout.

Random House. 270 pages. $25.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

It seems to me that great literature pierces the soul. It subverts conventions and questions the mazelike horrors and wonders of being human. Good literature provokes. Popular literature comforts. Elizabeth Strout’s seductively clear-eyed new novel — an ingenious collection of intertwined short stories that play off of one another — lies somewhere between the good and the popular.

These psychologically layered and astute tales take place in Crosby, Maine. Sea air and the shifting tides permeate the characters’ lives. And these lives, like most of our own, are quirkily bleak, quietly desperate, and filled with the daily acts of survival.

Strout gives us mesmerizing explorations of age, death, adulteries, divorces, the querulous intricacies of men and women, partners and spouses, bumping into one another, picking at each others’ scabs, flaring up suddenly into emotional injuries and parental outrage, perilously balanced on deep-seated fears of loss and loneliness. An abiding sense of drift and terror permeates all of them, so astutely described that these could be our neighbors, our fellow creatures, just as scared of the dark, as longing for the light, as we all are.

Brooding within these tales is the retired seventh-grade math teacher, Olive Kitteridge, a woman who frightens people by her outspoken insights, bursts into emotional flame at any sudden irritating incident, tyrannizes her son and husband with a love so deep that it emerges as anger and judgment, and carries on a persistent petulant quarrel with the world.

She’s a big woman, not very likable, but on target with her acerbic views. Her presence ties the tales together as she looms over them like some single-minded Greek chorus with her own complaints and sorrows, stunned by her husband’s sudden stroke and her browbeaten son’s marriage, divorce and re-marriage.

Like most of us, she seeks some plateau of security, which she continually sabotages by her often ornery comments. As her husband, Henry, explains, “In all the years we’ve been married, all the years, I don’t believe you’ve ever once apologized. For anything.”

All-too-human creatures emerge in Crosby, Maine: an anorexic runaway, sudden lovers, pianists filled with regret, men building boats in their basements that will never see the light of day, kindly pharmacists, wary shoplifters, adolescents stumbling through hormonal imbalances, and heartfelt gossips. Within Strout’s compassionate scrutiny, they emerge as real, breathing human beings, trying to make their lives add up to something.

And yet because all of this takes place in Crosby, these sorrows and despairs seem cushioned and cocooned by small-town life. There’s an abiding safety net beneath them, not within them, but in the routines and geography of the seaside town they inhabit. Maybe this is my bias, but terror here seems softened somehow. It doesn’t pierce the soul but comfortably shows us life as ordinary and as complex as our own.

This is a good, thoughtful, humanly realistic novel. However unlikable and often grotesque these survivors might be, their town shelters them, and as their lives fade and fumble, there’s a regularity and persistence in them that mirrors the incoming and outgoing tides. However baffling the world appears around her, Olive Kitteridge concedes that “she did not want to leave it yet.” OLIVE KITTERIDGE,