IN THE tiny, run-down, rural town of Amgash, Illinois, lives Tommy Guptill, a kind man who became a school janitor after losing his farm in a fire. Privately, he cherishes the memory of this fire, believing it to be a sign from God.

Watching the flames, he had felt “what he could only think was the presence of God, and he understood why angels had always been portrayed as having wings, because there had been a sensation of that, of a rushing sound, or not even a sound, and then it was as though God, who had no face, but was God, pressed up against him and conveyed to him without words — so briefly, so fleetingly — some message that Tommy understood to be: It’s all right, Tommy.”

Later, this man will share this vision — something he has never mentioned to anyone, not even his wife — with another person: a lonely “poor boy-man” living at the end of a dirt track, whose brutal childhood Tommy knows a little about. And as soon as he does so, Tommy no longer believes it. He feels he has “pulled the plug on himself”. “Where are you God?” he asks, on his way home. “But the car remained the same.”

In its quiet but devastating exploration of the slipperiness of “the presence of God”, this story, one of a collection Anything is Possible, serves as a doorway into the religious landscape of the American novelist Elizabeth Strout.

It’s a world in which the outer signs — a decline in churchgoing, services that fail to inspire, congregations that fail to love — are not permitted to obscure the power of private experiences of God. Witnessing these experiences — invariably fiercely guarded by the individual — feels almost intrusive, something we could shatter with a sceptical response.

Here is Isabelle, a lonely single mother whose true desire is for a husband, “or at least a daughter I can stand”, but who prays instead for God’s love and guidance, for a sign. It is her habit to do so before dinner, “lying down on her white bedspread, her skin moist from the shower, closing her eyes against the low white ceiling above her, to pray for His love”. Feeling nothing, she decides, that, “God was probably tired as well.”

In another novel, Abide with Me, Tyler Caskey, a widowed pastor longs “to have The Feeling arrive; when every flicker of light that touched the dipping branches of a weeping willow . . . would fill the minister with profound and irreducible knowledge that God was right there.”

Praying alone, one of his congregation grasps after a “thrilling presence” but finds that this feeling is “a bubble whose delicate skin, reflecting the shadows and lights of her thoughts, would simply disappear, and then she felt peevish; once this happened, the large feeling would not come back.”

It would be easy to conclude, reading such passages, that Strout is suspicious of religious feeling, alive to its potential to evaporate and disappoint. And yet there remains an ambiguity in her stories in which, so often, the denouement arrives in a sort of resigned, if not contented, bafflement. What can we ever really know about God? About others? About ourselves?

AWARDED the Pulitzer Prize for her third book, Olive Kitteridge, in 2009, Elizabeth Strout is one of the most critically celebrated authors of her generation. Hilary Mantel praised “an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue”. She grew up in small towns in Maine and New Hampshire, and her nine novels explore life in similar communities with a cast of characters that have a habit of appearing in one another’s stories.

Shame is a frequent theme. So too are poverty, class, and trauma. “It’s a sad world,” is the silent message exchanged between two of her characters. “And I’m sorry.” Yet her work remains profoundly hopeful, a reminder of the potential for life to dazzle us, to leave us feeling pure gladness.

Strout herself has spoken many times of her motivation as a novelist: the question “what does it feel like to be another person?” serves as the “furnace behind my work”. Many reviews have alighted upon her gift for igniting in the reader sparks of recognition — yes, that is how life is — and teasing forth empathy for characters that defy quick affection.

“One of the many things I like about writing is that I get to be sort of judgement free,” she observed in 2013. “I make these people up, so I don’t have to condemn them. I can watch them behave badly and love them.”

It’s an attitude that produces in her stories a powerful undercurrent of grace. Sometimes this is evident in the fates granted to characters, often in the form of restored relationships, or a sort of serendipity that feels like divine providence.

There is a benevolence to the narration, a merciful eye cast over people and communities whose flaws are, if not excused, explained. “Most of them did the best they could, the people of Shirley Falls,” we read, of the fictional small Maine town in which many of her novels are set.

Strout is also masterful in tracing the effects of sins of the heart — anger, bitterness, envy. Olive Kitteridge is aware that, “deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me.”

HBOThe actress Frances Dormand in the title role of the film Olive Kitteridge

This is a moral universe in which perhaps the best we can hope for is that, in coming to recognise our own darkness, and how little we understand of ourselves (“I do not understand what I do” as St Paul put it), we manage to extend a portion of grace to those around us.

THIS steady supply of mercy brings to mind the Bible’s talk of help with heavy burdens, of compassion for the downtrodden. And it sits above Strout’s portraits of an institutional Church that, while tempered by the same leniency, lay bare its failings.

In Shirley Falls, the “simple, white” Congregational church is a source of pain to Isabelle, who remains deeply wounded by comments made about her choice of autumn flower decoration, and imagines in detail how it might come up in conversation at the dinner parties to which she is not invited. Having grown up in abject poverty, Lucy Barton recalls that, at the local church, “we were outcasts there as much as anywhere.”

Strout has described herself as a “church hopper . . . I like to go to different churches and observe what they do.” As a child, her family attended a Congregational church and she has written about an austere upbringing with parents who held a “skeptical view of pleasure . . . strict with a rigidity that made me believe the world was a dangerous place and vice lurked at the door to combat virtue.”

A long profile in the The New Yorker, which accompanied Strout to Maine, concluded with a sort of epitaph to New England’s Puritan descendants. Strout observes that “the people I write about are disappearing. And that’s fine. It’s time. It’s like, ‘Please, hello — let’s have some others in here now.’”

For Strout, whose mother’s family have lived in the state since 1603, Maine’s Puritan heritage seems to be bound up with snobbery, repression, and a predilection for shame. When his sister refuses to take a sleeping pill, Bob Burgess puts it down to their Puritan ancestors, “who were kind of insane, when you think of it. Too insane to stay in England. Puritan have a lot of shame . . . You have to understand.”

CRITICS have often contrasted Strout’s treatment of Puritanism with that of Marilynne Robinson, and it’s true that she seems particu­larly attuned to negative associ­ations, speaking of “dry, suppressed” qualities that writers such as Robin­­son have sought to challenge.

But it is notable that when Strout explored church life in detail, in Abide with Me, she places in the foreground a sympathetic character: a young, idealistic Congregational min­­ister overwhelmed by the death of his wife. “I was interested in writ­­ing about a religious man who is genuine in his religiosity and who gets confronted with such sadness so abruptly that he loses himself,” Strout has explained. “Not his faith, but his faith in himself.”

In West Annett, Tyler Caskey, of “pale Puritan eyes”, is no snob, and, if he retains traces of zealotry, then they are accompanied by a genuine love for his congregation, even as he imagines “taking them gently by the scruff of their white New England necks”, eager to impart to them that being a Christian is “not a hobby”.

Strout has spoken of reading “a tremendous amount of theology” in order to write this novel, and of learning in the process “how difficult it is to be a minister”. What emerges is a masterful portrait of the risks in­­herent in all ministry — isolation, exhaustion, and the idolisation of spiritual giants — and the destruct­­ive dynamics that can take hold of any congregation, including deep, admiring attachment to a minister which must inevitably corrode into disappointment.

FOR the Episcopal Bishop of Maine, the Rt Revd Thomas J. Brown, much of what Strout depicts is familiar. Having grown up in “a very small town, really a hamlet”, of just 22 houses in a working-class part of northern Michigan, he now oversees clergy working in the small towns of New England, and is cognisant of the challenges faced by those “who are, as we say in Maine ‘From Away’”, including “small-mindedness, judgmentalism, a great disdain for people From Away”. And yet he has seen clergy thrive in such situations: “Ministry in a small town requires a kind of delight in smallness . . . to take the community as an object for one’s love and passion.”

The Bishop of Maine, the Rt Revd Thomas J. Brown

But noting the recent history that has produced “one of the most liberal and progressive” denominations in the country, he believes that “you would be hard pressed to find a Congregational church that looks like the kind that Elizabeth portrays in her writing.” He, too, reads across to the work of Marilynne Robinson, whose Gilead series tells the story of a Congregationalist minister and his family. “She has taken Calvinism and defined it in such a way, for many of us, to be something that’s attractive, rather than destructive,” he observes. “I think a lot of Elizabeth’s characters still cling to . . . a Puritan mindset that is old-fashioned, whereas Marilynne gives us characters that I think…have a sense of hope mixed with this sense of depravity.”

Nevertheless, he does recognise elements of Strout’s depiction of the Puritan mindset, particularly in attitudes to pain, noting: “the ways in which we continue, in Maine, to speak about the great moral failure that happens when we are sick, and the great moral gain that we achieve when we soldier on”. He thinks of a priest who was determined to avoid taking pain medication, even during cancer treatment.

Strout’s Shirley Falls is divided into two by its river: on one side statues of the Virgin Mary can be found in the front yards of Catholic mill workers; on the other live the town’s few professionals, and a Congregational church. Prejudice about the Catholic population is alive and well. Isabelle, the single mother featured in the first novel, Amy & Isabelle, has very deliberately chosen to live on the Protestant side of the river, and is clear that, “You didn’t want God to think you were selfish by asking for things, the way the Catholics did.” The earthy, frank, tight-knit community that exists among her co-workers is something she must learn to appreciate.

Bishop Brown thinks of a similar divide in Lewiston-Auburn, and a geography in which the bequests left by mill owners to the Episcopal church are still very much in evidence.

“I think class is the biggest divider of the nation that I live in,” he observes. “And the irony of that is that we, of course, are forever saying that our history is not about class. . . This, I think, Elizabeth gets spot on.” He is conscious that, for his own denomination, “our sense of bourgeois, upper-class aspirations continues to be a terrible stumbling block for us to be able to connect with working-class people, or people who have no experience of organised Christianity.”

Another characteristic he recognises is a reluctance to speak openly about religious experience. Travelling around churches in Maine he will ask “what do you find yourself saying to your friends and to your neighbours about your faith?”, only to be met with “dead silence”.

“Part of what I think Elizabeth does is to highlight this practical grit and this sense of what is right and what is wrong,” he says. “I think that reflects a lot of rural places in America. I find that in Maine, among Episcopalians, there continues to be this privatization of religious experience, that it’s a very private thing and so ‘I would never talk about it lest someone think I’m a whacked evangelical…’”

Yet he finds in the novels a source of hope. In a country in which political partisanship leaves families struggling to share a table, Bishop Brown believes that picking up an Elizabeth Strout book may enable a person “to see with a kind of kaleidoscope the multi-dimensions of what it means to be a human, and what it means to live in community, and what it means to make meaning.”

GOSSIP is a phenomenon that powers the plots of Strout’s stories. In several places, it is mendacious, malicious, as if the Bible’s warnings about its destructive potential are brought to life.

“The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to the inmost parts,” says the writer of Proverbs. And here is Rhonda Skillings of West Annett, experi­encing a “vague rumour” about Tyler and his housekeeper as “a piece of cake in her mouth that she had to speak around”.

Yet Strout is also alive to the good that “good stories” can do, and the very human desire to pass on the true tales in our possession. It is an idea that she turns inside out in several of her novels, pulling back to hold up to scrutiny her own motives as an author.

There is often a chatty, intimate tone in the background of her writing, and The Burgess Boys even begins with a 19th-century framing device: an unnamed daughter asks her mother to tell her the story of the titular characters, reflecting that such gossip is like “a cat’s cradle connecting my mother to me, and me to Shirley Falls”. Lucy Barton is advised by a mentor that good writing means “going to the page with a heart as open as the heart of God”, and, in telling the story of her own abusive childhood, makes another reader, plagued by shame, “feel much less alone”.

AlamyElizabeth Strout at an Italian literary festival in 2017

Bishop Brown appreciates the dis­­tinctions at play. “I think really ef­­­fect­ive clergy, certainly in small towns, can use the grapevine stra­tegic­ally,” he observes.

“What is labelled as gossip is not necessarily the same as mean-spirited­ness, and I think it is import­ant to sometimes have an ear peeled for what is malicious and cutting and under­mining versus telling people’s stories so that connections can thrive and flourish.”

PRESENT in the backdrop of Strout’s novels is America’s religious decline. Abide with Me is set in 1959, “the first year in many where the country’s church membership has not increased at a rate greater than the general population”.

In many places, characters have given up on going to church, or go only to be disappointed. And yet God is not absent for these small towns. Both a bereaved five-year-old and a lonely single mother tell God that they hate him. A gentle pharma­cist, attending church with­out his can­tankerous wife, decides that “God’s magnificence was there in the quiet stateliness of the coastline and the slightly rocking water.” In Amgash, a tortured Vietnam veteran with a mistress feels a need to pray, “as abhorrent to him as the sight of his wife”: “Dear God, forgive me if you can stand to.”

For all the darkness at play, these communities are also home to char­­ac­­ters whose simple goodness transmits God’s love. Carol Meadows acts as a confidante to Tyler Caskey’s frustrated young wife and, after her death, her young daughter. This is a woman who “remembered how Jesus said that if you are asked to walk a mile, offer to walk two”.

The existence of such characters feels like an act of defiance against too deep a cynicism about God’s creation. “Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker,” Lucy Barton observes. “And that’s what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.” Yes, Strout seems to be saying, good people exist, too.

As we take our leave of Strout’s characters, we tend to find them in a state of humbled wonder, bewildered yet, for the moment, at least, at peace, marvelling at how little they know. “We are all mysteries,” her latest story, Lucy by the Sea, concludes. “This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.”

In West Annett, Tyler Caskey, struggling to order his thoughts, is advised by his mentor at theological college that “confusion will prevent you from being dogmatic.” It is in this dazed state that his young daugh­­ter, a quiet house, the trees, and the snow on his face suddenly appear “remarkable”.

In Shirley Falls, Isabelle has given up on praying, and yet she has not given up on God: “It was more that she was aware of some large and fundamental ignorance deep within her, a bafflement that lived, not un­­comfortably, with whatever else she might be feeling; she accepted this.”

This note of bafflement contains within it an echo of doubt cast on Strout’s own project. Here is an author who has spoken many times of her driving desire to show us what it might be like to be another person, giving to one of her most beloved characters, Lucy, the revelation that: “We never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.”

Perhaps the final word should go to Suzanne Larkin, a woman whom we meet once, in a story, “Help”, in Olive, Again. In it, we are privy to Suzanne’s conversation with Bernie, the family lawyer, and another tentat­­ive confession of faith.

“When I was a kid . . . I would take these walks and I would get this feeling, this very deep sensation, and I understood . . . that it had some­thing to do with God,” she discloses. “But I haven’t had it for years, and so I wonder: Did I make it up? But I know I didn’t, Bernie. . .”

It is a story with echoes of Tommy Guptill’s, but, in this in­­stance, both parties are blessed by the confidence. Bernie finds that “everything she was saying was entirely understand­able to him,” and is left in “quiet astonishment . . . as though her innocence had washed over him”. Suzanne feels “as though huge win­dows above her had been smashed”, the ordinary world around her — a young boy and his mother laughing, a small pink maple tree, bringing forth a “Wow”.

The risk of telling an intimate, confusing story, and telling it “with a heart as open as the heart of God”, is rewarded by a moment of grace.

Listen to an interview with Bishop Thomas J. Brown on the Church Times Podcast.