Reviewed by Harriet
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from not being able to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views that others find inadmissible. (Carl Jung)
This quotation is the epigraph to Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, and perfectly encapsulates its content and theme. Over the past nine years I’ve reviewed six of Strout’s exceptional novels on Shiny. There were recurring characters in them all, notably Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. These two have their own novels and their own worlds, until in the final novel, Tell Me Everything, their lives finally collide. In Things We Never Say, though, she takes the reader elsewhere – Massachusetts rather than Illinois where Lucy grew up and Maine where Olive lives and where Lucy moves to, and a new cast of characters is introduced.
The novel revolves around Artie Dam, a 57-year-old history teacher. On the surface his life looks pleasant and comfortable. He and his wife Evie have been married for thirty years and have an adult son Rob. Artie is good at his job and liked by his students, and he relaxes at the weekend by sailing his boat on the Massachusetts Bay. But from the start of the novel, the cracks appear. Evie seems distant and uninterested in Artie, his life and his thoughts. Rob has broken up with his long-term girlfriend, and despite his successful job seems worryingly quiet and uncommunicative: Artie wonders if this may have something to do with a car accident when Rob was seventeen, in which his then girlfriend was killed, but this is a subject that is never raised. Increasingly isolated and depressed, Artie is dreading the almost inevitable results of the upcoming 2024 election which make him feel ‘as if noose was tightening around his neck’. With all of this, he has decided that suicide is the best way out, and is pondering over the ways and means. Drowning seems like the obvious option, and he actually sets off in his boat with no intention of returning. But a chance event foils his attempt, and he accepts that this was somehow meant to be. However, despite his desire to come back to normality, life still has a lot to throw at him, including a shocking revelation that affects everything he has always thought and believed about his family life. Surely this is something that needs to be brought into the open and talked about, but somehow Artie never feels it’s the right time.
Strout’s great skill lies in showing the inner lives of people who may appear ordinary and unexciting to others, and this certainly applies to Artie. While he continues with his teaching, his family life, and his interactions with a small group of colleagues and friends, he is constantly pondering questions of free will, grief, betrayal, the fragility of human connection, and the fact that
to say anything real was to say things nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand. It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.
This probably makes the novel sound like a depressing read, and some readers may find it so. It’s certainly set in a post-pandemic world in which young people, like Artie’s students, suffer from anxiety, and one in which politics have become insanely confusing and divisive. But it is a thought-provoking novel of great beauty and wisdom, the ending is both moving and uplifting, and Strout’s spare style is as always a joy to read.
Harriet is one of the founders of Shiny, and a co-editor.
Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say (Viking, 2026). 978-0241814307, 208pp., hardback.
BUY at Waterstones via our affiliate link.
