Abide With Me

A satisfying reading by Bernadette Dunne brings warmth and charm to Elizabeth Strout's uplifting look at one man's struggle with grief. When his wife dies after a lengthy illness, Tyler Caskey, minister to a congregation in West Arnett, Maine, finds himself barely coping. His daughter is out of control at school, and his congregation begins to question his ability to lead. Bernadette Dunne's performance populates the town with people as real as anyone's next-door neighbors. She develops Tyler as a man whose life and belief system at first offer him insufficient solace. As he begins to realize that comfort only comes of helping others, Dunne elevates his awareness to something more than a faith-based cliché. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine

October 17, 2005
Strout's satisfying follow-up to her 1999 debut, Amy and Isabel
, follows a recent widower from grief through breakdown to recovery in 1959 smalltown Maine. The father of two young girls and the newly appointed minister of the fictional town of West Annett, Tyler Caskey is quietly devastated by wife Lauren's death following a prolonged illness. Tyler's older daughter Katherine is deeply antisocial at school and at home; his adorable younger daughter Jeannie has been sent to live upstate with Tyler's overbearing mother. Talk begins to spread of Katherine's increasing unsoundness and of Tyler's possible affair with his devoted-though-suspicious housekeeper, Connie Hatch. It's spearheaded by the gossipy Ladies' Aide Society, whose members bear down on Tyler like the dark clouds of a gathering storm. Meanwhile, Tyler's grief shades into an angry, cynical depression, leaving him unable to parent his troubled daughter or minister to his congregation, and putting his job and family at risk. Strout's deadpan, melancholy prose powerfully conveys Tyler's sense of internal confinement. The uplifting ending arrives too easily, but on the whole, Strout has crafted a harrowing meditation of exile on Main Street.