“[A] whole suppressed world of the spirit seems to be speaking in and through Strout’s characters, a spirit urging the slaves of conventional reality to awaken to their need of liberation. For all the depths of anger and despair they uncover, and the bitterness they attest to, Strout’s works insist on the superabundance of life, the unrealized bliss always immanent in it.”
Pankaj Mishra, “Writing the Other America,” The New York Review, November 4, 2021.