The protagonist of The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout’s 11th novel, is a 57-year-old high-school history teacher named Artie Dam. On the face of it, Artie has a supportive wife, friends, and is well regarded by his students and colleagues. He was even named Teacher of the Year by the state of Massachusetts a few years back.
But, we quickly learn, there is something gnawing away at his insides. A decade ago, Artie’s teenage son, Rob, was driving with his girlfriend, Heather, when he crashed the car, killing her. Heather’s parents tried to sue Rob and the Dams. Ever since, Rob hasn’t been quite the same, nor has his relationship with his father. The effects of this on Artie, alongside the realisation that his wife, Evie, is increasingly distant, and mixed with memories of his childhood – during which his mother experienced psychotic episodes – play out in the ageing teacher’s head via Strout’s tidy vignettes. Then comes the Stroutian – that is, typically direct – blow: “Artie’s secret was this: for more than two months, he had been thinking about how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so.”
In a Strout novel, trauma is never far away. After all, the American author’s most beloved protagonists are Olive Kitteridge – who has a cameo here as “a crotchety old woman from Maine” in a novel Evie likes, and whose awfulness stems in part from her father’s suicide – and Lucy Barton, whose childhood was marked by poverty and abuse. Strout is a bestselling novelist and has won numerous plaudits, including a Pulitzer. This is due to her gift for excavating trauma without sentimentality, and distilling life’s truths into elemental parts. Her books speak both to readers craving a story publishers might label “heartwarming”, and to more literary types for whom her characters offer a way in to contemplating Jungian philosophy.
But in The Things We Never Say Strout lays on the trauma especially thick. It’s not just Artie who is suffering: almost everyone is. His friend Flossie is grieving the death of her husband, so moves away to be near her daughter, whom she then remembers she hates. A plumber who comes to fix the Dams’s leaky tap confides in Artie that his wife is having an affair. In two years’ time, in an unnecessary flash-forward, we learn that Hoover Lakeland, Artie’s principal, will die by suicide on the school grounds.
This makes for a heavy backdrop to a family revelation that I won’t spoil. It’s the kind of news that would send a lot of us spinning out of control. To Strout’s credit, she doesn’t allow Artie to react so stereotypically. Instead, the event gives him a new perspective on his lot, and his character is shown to be thoughtful and complex.
The same cannot be said of Strout’s rendering of the current political climate. The book begins in the run-up to Trump’s second presidency; a character refers to “the mess with Israel and Gaza”. At one point, Artie is even reading a biography of Elon Musk, whose “father was an awful man”. It all feels trite, a too obvious add-on to this story of one man’s reckoning with fatherhood.
This being an Elizabeth Strout novel, there are nonetheless moments of beauty. “The blinker was like a gentle touch on Artie’s shoulder,” she writes, as he drives behind a car whose flashing light provides him with comfort. A little later, thoughts of his father “came to him most thickly as he was getting ready for bed, and then they got into bed with him, and the sadness he felt was almost warm, as though the quilt that covered him was his father”. In these most intimate scenes, Strout’s turns of phrase are gorgeous.
But the novel is ultimately let down by its eager self-fulfilment. “I wonder why people never say anything real,” Artie ponders early on, echoing the book’s title, as he and Evie return home from a party. Towards the end, he realises why: “Because to say anything real was to say things that 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.”
The best, most sustaining novels pose questions; they don’t answer them, at least not so definitively. For all the messiness The Things We Never Say purports to explore, its philosophical conclusion is too neat, too easy.
The Things We Never Say
Elizabeth Strout
Viking, 208pp, £18.99
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[Further reading: Lena Dunham and the art monster]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 29 Apr 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The cover-up?
Join the debate
Subscribe here to comment