At first glance, Elizabeth Strout’s fiction seems light and easy. What we see is what we get, and what we get are clear-cut characters, straightforward storylines, gentle fun, and homespun charm. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s novels are deceptively simple. Beneath the surface sparkle and shimmer, there lurk hidden depths. As we turn the pages, we discover that Strout’s tales of small-town life contain big human problems. “Love was the skin that protected you from the world,” muses Patty in Strout’s 2017 novel Anything is Possible. But for characters whose relationships are strained and inner lives are complicated, love is either hard to come by or not nearly strong enough to cushion the blows.
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In her new novel, Strout again presents what appear to be ordinary lives and everyday scenarios, and it isn’t long before hard knocks and harder truths reveal complex emotional layers or prompt drastic turns of events. But The Things We Never Say isn’t entirely business as usual. Strout dispenses with her traditional Maine setting and instead establishes her cast in coastal Massachusetts. More importantly, that cast consists of fresh faces. Strout’s previous works were intricately interlinked, and famous protagonists Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton have made a series of welcome returns. (In her last novel, 2024’s Tell Me Everything, Strout even staged a meet-up for both her heroines.) Strout’s latest is a clean slate, which gives her the opportunity to start anew. But does her central character prove as memorable as her past creations?
He is 57-year-old Artie Dam, an eleventh-grade history teacher at a local high school. He is good at his job: The state of Massachusetts named him Teacher of the Year, and his students often chant “Damn-dam, the greatest man.” He is happily married to Evie, a family therapist, and they live in a beautiful house with an ocean view. Their adult son, Rob, is a successful software engineer. Artie enjoys the time he spends with his good friend Flossie MacDonald — “he could be himself with her.” He derives equal pleasure taking his sailboat out on the bay.
Artie seems to be thoroughly content, but in truth, he is coming undone. He thinks back to his checkered childhood, during which money was in short supply and his troubled mother was institutionalized after suffering psychotic “spells.” He realizes that the anxiety he was inflicted with as a boy never went away and has recently developed into full-blown fear, “a large and massive thing that hung in front of him that he had to move through all the time.” He feels Evie has little interest in what he has to say. Meanwhile, Rob, still processing the trauma from a car accident 10 years earlier, has become aloof. When Flossie moves to Ohio to be near her daughter, Artie is left to struggle on with his “double life” and grapple with his overarching affliction: loneliness.
It is no spoiler to disclose that Artie contemplates the best method of suicide and then decides to get the job done. “People do die of loneliness,” he tells himself, “and I am — or will be — one of them.” It is also no spoiler to reveal that following a near-death experience, Artie is given a new lease of life. At this point, a lesser writer would switch from serious to saccharine and adopt a moralistic stance to depict a reborn Artie learning to love himself again and showing the downhearted and the desperate that their lives, too, are worth living. However, Strout is not that kind of writer. She is unsentimental, all too ready to kill her darlings or at least ensure that not all of them get to live happily ever after.
Strout allows Artie to pick himself up and dust himself off, and for a while, he carries on as usual. He deals with a parent complaint at school and student issues in the classroom, and he imparts fatherly wisdom to Rob about how to break up with his girlfriend. But Strout makes it abundantly clear that emotional scars don’t heal so quickly, and that Artie is still struggling in his “state of dismalness.” For starters, he impulsively and inexplicably steals a comb and shortly afterward tries to shoplift two shirts. He also agonizes over a thorny existential matter — is there is such a thing as free will? — and bothers everyone around him with the same query. Has his fate been ordained, or is he in charge of his own destiny?
This all unfolds while Artie is reeling from a bombshell revelation. True to form, Strout kicks her protagonist when he’s down, but in this instance, it would spoil all to divulge more. Suffice it to say, it involves a decades-old secret, a historic betrayal, and a deathbed confession. Strout delivers her shock, then compels us to read on to find out whether her beleaguered hero will lose all he values or recover and recalibrate his life.
In keeping with the best Strout novels, this one is an enthralling character study. And what a character Artie is. Strout renders him tragicomic: his gauche behavior, endearing naivete, and insistence on wearing white socks with “old man black sneakers” raise smiles. His depths of despair — “The pain he felt was almost physical, he was that sad” — raise concern.
Strout’s 11th novel is marred in places. Some of her descriptions are stale (“white clouds rolled past, puffy-looking like enormous cotton balls”), and she occasionally recycles and repurposes metaphors (Artie has “deep pockets of sensitivity,” while Evie sporadically wrestles with “deep pockets of grief”). The narrative tracks the build-up to, and fallout from, the 2024 election, but the political commentary feels bolted on rather than blended in. And then there is Strout’s overall structure. The book consists of a series of short-gapped episodes. A few are only a couple of lines long. Manageable bite-sized chunks for some readers will be meager, unnourishing portions for others.
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The fragmentary structure can result in disruptive stopping and starting. But it also enables Strout to variegate her storytelling. She employs a range of different techniques, such as dream sequences and flashbacks. “Memories,” she writes, “began to pop up like mushrooms after a fall rain.” She also employs effective flash-forwards to give us peeks into certain individuals’ futures as well as glimpses of lives cut short.
As ever, though, Strout’s plot plays second fiddle to her themes. Here, in addition to examining the effects of trauma and the problem of loneliness, she offers a fresh look at a perennial issue in her work: the extent to which we can truly know other people. “So blind we humans are — so blind,” notes Strout. “To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone.”
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
