Elizabeth Strout’s new novel is superb – politics aside
Elizabeth Strout writes extraordinary fiction about ordinary people . Her men and women live what Thoreau called lives of “quiet desperation”; Strout’s gift is to reveal their frustrations and epiphanies in stories that are deceptively simple yet carry a profound emotional charge. The Things We Never Say introduces us to 57-year-old Artie Dam, a new character in Strout’s fictional universe who will nevertheless, in his anguished, flawed decency, be immediately recognisable to her readers as a type.
The novel is set in small-town New England, territory Strout has already made her own. In a neat mise-en-abyme, Artie remembers that his wife of three decades, Evie, “had loved some book – oh, years ago now – about a crotchety old woman from Maine… the woman thought: People die of loneliness. It happens all the time.” We recognise the reference to the magnificently morose schoolteacher in Olive Kitteridge (2008): the reflection is hers, and it lies at the heart of The Things We Never Say .
Like Olive, Artie is a long-married high-school teacher with a son. It’s 2024, and America is about to have another election. Theirs is a normal family, which is to say it is held together with judicious silences and evasions. Artie and Evie’s son Rob was once involved in a car accident in which his girlfriend at the time died. Artie knows, though Evie does not, what caused the accident. But there are other things that Rob knows about his mother and father’s relationship which Artie doesn’t yet know, and which could be devastating if discovered. After enduring a neighbourhood cocktail party full of platitudes, Artie asks, “I wonder why people never say anything real.” In this novel, Strout shows us why, by gradually exposing the deathly force of those inadmissible things.
On the face of it, Artie has had a successful life. He’s been voted Teacher of the Year; he’s a loving father and loyal husband. Yet he suffers from depression and isolation and is troubled by memories of his upbringing: his working-class childhood, marred by difficult relationships with an awkward, sad sister and an unpredictably violent mother, was very different from Evie’s privileged start as a Boston Brahmin.
As the novel unfolds, Artie becomes aware of the widening emotional gap between them, an “accretion of loneliness”, exacerbated first by these invisible wounds, then by his discovery of his wife’s secret. Like Olive Kitteridge, he’s prey to covert impulses – he pilfers a cheap comb, some expensive shirts – and thoughts of suicide. These are just some of the things Artie never says: he’s aware that “he lied by omission, but he lied all the time”.
In Strout’s fictional universe the personal is always political. But her novels are also typically rooted in current events : it’s one of the things that makes them feel like front-line reports from real life. Her characters have tried to make sense of the displacements of the Covid-19 pandemic , the January 6 assault on the Capitol, and the 2020 racial justice protests. And yet here the politics feel oddly grafted on; the references to “the terrible stuff in the Middle East and Ukraine” and the pending presidential elections shorthand for automatic moral judgments.
If a character is “a supporter of our incoming president”, he (it is usually a “he”) will invariably be revealed as a liar and a philanderer. Elon Musk is “an evil genius” , “very, very smart and very, very crazy”; Donald Trump is “this lunatic”. These observations may well be accurate – who knows, for example, if Musk “had always been a strange child”? But such crude signalling feels clumsy in a story that has, up to this point, drawn a delicate line between evasion and truth, while offering a nuanced view of the fractures in modern American society.
The real moral engine of the novel lies in its reckoning with the characters’ pervasive sense of shame. Artie’s shoplifting is a form of shame; the deceptions practised by almost everyone in the book stem from shame. Strout’s tenderness towards human frailty is immense. Artie concludes that “to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know”. Once he learns what Evie has withheld, he realises not only that he does not know his wife, but that he “had somehow missed this fact about every single person: that they held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe”. Our irreducible loneliness is summed up near the end of this lucidly bleak novel in a single sentence: “It was a private thing, to be alive.” Private and, ultimately, unsayable.
★★★★☆
Elizabeth Lowry is the author of novels including The Chosen. The Things We Never Say is published by Viking at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
