Early in Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, the retired teacher Olive Kitteridge reads all of the memoirs by Lucy Barton, a New York City writer who arrived in her coastal Maine town during the pandemic. At Olive’s request, an acquaintance named Bob Burgess has arranged for the two women to meet. “Olive did not know if Lucy was a famous writer or a not quite famous writer,” Strout writes, “but she decided it did not matter.”

Lucy isn’t Strout, but Lucy’s (fictional) memoirs are Strout’s (real-life) novels: My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), Oh William! (2021), and Lucy by the Sea (2022). And as serious novelists go, Strout is a “famous writer”: Olive Kitteridge (2008) won the Pulitzer, and an HBO limited series adaptation swept the Emmys; My Name Is Lucy Barton became a one-woman Broadway play; both Olive, Again (2019) and Tell Me Everything are selections­­­ of Oprah’s Book Club.

Strout’s fiction has an unlikely appeal. In “Writing the Other America,” a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra notes Strout’s interest in the lives of the very old as well as the very poor. But whatever else she is writing about, she is always writing about loneliness. As children, Lucy Barton and her siblings were shunned because they smelled. Lucy also knows the loneliness of being a born writer in an environment that had little use for her sensitivity. Bob Burgess is isolated by extreme guilt: For most of his life he has believed himself responsible for an accident that killed his father. Olive Kitteridge has been lonely in both marriage and widowhood, and is pretty much a lifelong community outcast. Though Strout peers into these lives with warmth and compassion (and favors cozy titles like Tell Me Everything and Anything Is Possible), she has tended to do so without sentimentality.

And yet her recent novels, including the latest, are not as adept at treading that line. Tell Me Everything revolves mostly around Olive and Lucy, who sit and swap stories, and Bob and Lucy, who walk and do the same (they started strolling together during the pandemic), but there are several subplots. In one of them, Bob’s brother, Jim, is catapulted by a son’s accident into “another world,........

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