From Elizabeth Strout to Stephen King, how Maine took over the literary map

Maine is the most isolated slice of the continental United States. It’s a place that stretches so far north it forms a peninsula into Canada, and so far east that it’s where the country comes closest to brushing Europe. And yet Maine’s frigid landscapes and cloistered small towns occupy a conspicuously outsized space in American fiction. The population of the state has hovered just above a relatively minuscule million people for almost 50 years, but in the last two decades its rough shores, tall pines, and one-horse towns have inspired three winners of the Pulitzer Prize: Richard Russo’s Empire Falls (2002), Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge (2009), and Paul Harding’s elegiac novel of loss, Tinkers (2010).

Maine is a place where the wind keens through packed forests. Snow accumulates by the side of the road into mounds as tall as houses. You could go as far back as Henry David Thoreau’s obsessively observed 1864 nature essay The Maine Woods to find crystalline depictions of the state, but really there’s no need. Maine, and its relentless topography, is everywhere in fiction. Think of The Cider House Rules and John Irving’s patients rendering of the map, from inland mountains which slide into unfarmed valleys which give way to “the bright Maine sea”. Atmospheric bestsellers, like Christina Baker Kline’s haunted Orphan Train and Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water, with its misty sea that steamed like a bath. And most notably, Stephen King, the bard of a supernatural Maine in which the impossible feels inevitable.

This year I found myself back in Maine, on my lifelong literary road trip. It forms the backdrop to three new books: Lucy by the Sea, Strout’s nuanced return to the deep north, Morgan Talty’s beautifully raw debut story collection Night of the Living Rez, and Hokuloa Road, Elizabeth Hand’s incandescently creepy mystery about a Maine man who trades life in the middle of nowhere for Hawaii. What I found within their pages were three distinct places, separated according to their protagonist’s age, class, and conditions, but all enamoured and afraid of their own remoteness.

It’s Maine’s far-offness that drives the plot in Lucy by the Sea, Strout’s pandemic novel about an ageing duo from New York City who head north in the hopes of avoiding the deadly coronavirus. Professional writer Lucy and her ex-husband, William, will be familiar to readers of Strout’s previous novels, My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) and Oh William! (2021). In her latest, Maine is a refuge – not the real world, but a buffer that the pair are trying to put between themselves and where they’ve come from.

Upon her arrival in the town of Crosby – invented, but evocative of Maine’s sleepy coastal towns with their craggy shores (and also the hometown of Strout’s other heroine, Olive Kitteridge) – Lucy is greeted by drabness that suits her melancholy. “Everything looked really brown and bleak, and yet in a way that was interesting: There were many different shades of brown in the grasses that we passed by; there was a quietness to this,” Strout writes. Her Maine is imbued with a sense of sturdy permanence: the ocean surrounds Lucy “on both sides of the road”; the seaweed “lay wavy-like on the rocks”; “and the weather remained cold, bleak”. The novel is punctuated by loss – there are deaths, divorces, miscarriages – but also reconciliation. Maine holds still for Strout’s characters, cradling them while they reflect.

It’s a sympathetic relationship between person and place that couldn’t be more distinct from the Maine in Talty’s stories, set on the Penobscot Indian Nation reservation where the author was raised. His Maine is kinetic, aggressive, and ferociously present-tense. In “Burn”, the story that starts the collection, protagonist Dee is forced to cut off a friend’s long braid after he falls asleep outside and it becomes frozen into the snow. Like Lucy, Night of the Living Rez is about the hardness of life – addiction, runaway children, and infant loss all feature – but in Talty’s cocksure, angry prose, Maine is an additional source of pressure. Where Strout’s seaweed “lay wavy-like”, Talty’s “sharp pine trees clutter and lean into each other” (not unlike King’s in It: “the trees, mostly firs, were thick, growing everywhere, battling each other…”). In another story, the “thick, wet” rain plays a role in a violent car crash. Maine has all the destructive force of an antagonist, but none of the remorse. For those on the reservation, the landscape is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is hard to endure.

Hokuloa Road offers the most surprising rendering of all: Maine in the rear-view mirror, a memory that informs a character’s experience of elsewhere. Working-class Grady arrives on a fictional Hawaiian island in the hopes of fleeing the dead-end monotony of mid-pandemic Maine, but the results are disappointing to him. “The few houses Grady saw were modest. Cinder-block rectangles, modular homes… He’d flown halfway around the world to find himself surrounded by the same frigging s*** he’d grown up with.” The place seems imprinted upon him.

The version of Maine that prevails in each of these books exists at the nexus of a character’s personal history. Strout’s Lucy and William have the money to travel north in pursuit of safety; with construction work paused, Grady takes a job in Hawaii to survive the same event, someplace far from home. The brutality of Dee’s Maine is entirely separate from the elite coastal towns where New Yorkers have second homes – and yet they sit side by side. There’s a versatility to Maine – an edge-of-the-world outpost mysterious enough to accommodate opposing metaphors of homecoming, stasis, and escape.

But Maine’s more than a parlour trick. All three of these new novels capture the state’s impressionistic force, the sense that the landscape can shape lives. It’s a quality that, we know from Thoreau’s wanderings, predates the fiction it has inspired.

“Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be midwinter, is ever in her spring?” the transcendentalist wrote in the late 1840s after months spent exploring. Struggling to describe Maine literally, he instead describes the feel of it: “What a place to live, what a place to die and be buried in! There certainly men would live forever, and laugh at death and the grave.”

Or, as Hand puts it in elegant, wistful understatement: “Maybe Maine was the real world after all.”