A main character’s name often gives you the first clue to what a
novel is “about,” especially when it’s also the title of the
book. A good example turns up in Olive Kitteridge, the
collection of linked short stories that won the 2009 Pulitzer
Prize for fiction. A just-picked olive is as bitter — and the
color olive is as drab — as the title character of the book
appears at first to be. The salt added during curing removes the
bitterness just as love, the salt in this book, removes some of
Olive’s. In Ireland a kitter is a left-handed person. And Olive
is at least metaphorically left-handed: She’s out of sync with
others in her coastal town in Maine. A surname database says of
Kitter: “This is an Olde English or Anglo-Saxon pre 10th Century
name which derives from the word ‘Cyta’ and is a nickname of the
medieval period generally given to one of fairly violent
attitudes.” Olive’s views of life are “fairly violent,”
especially in the first story, when they are so angry they verge
on caricature. May 29, 2009 Wha