I cared about Artie Dam almost immediately. He’s a 57-year-old history teacher: kind, awkward, adored by his pupils and, on the surface, living a perfectly decent life. But underneath it all, Artie is deeply sad. He is bewildered by himself, by his marriage, and increasingly by the world around him. There is something so vulnerable and fundamentally good about him that within a few pages I was rooting for him completely.
Of course, this is Elizabeth Strout, so nothing is ever quite that simple. The Things We Never Say is about the huge things hidden inside ordinary lives: loneliness, marriage, parenthood, friendship, secrets, disappointment. Strout writes about them with extraordinary restraint. Nothing is overdone. Nothing is forced.
What gives this novel an extra edge is how firmly it sits in the real world. The story unfolds around the 2024 US presidential election and its aftermath. Trump is mostly left unnamed, but Artie’s alarm at the direction of America is unmistakable. But this isn’t really a novel about politics. It’s about what happens when the outside world becomes impossible to separate from our private lives. Artie’s sense that something has gone wrong in his own life becomes tangled up with his feeling that something has gone wrong in his country too. There is sadness here, but also humour, warmth and those tiny moments of human connection Strout captures so beautifully.
Artie isn’t heroic. He isn’t extraordinary. That’s exactly why he matters. I finished the novel enormously fond of him.
Quiet, compassionate, politically engaged and deceptively powerful this is highly recommended and available now in hardback.
Richard
