May 12, 2026
The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout
Don’t let that Elizabeth Strout has followed up her novel Tell Me Everything with one called The Things We Never Say make you think she’s shifted gears. Although she’s left Maine behind, and the familiar cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Bob Burgess, Olive Kitteridge, and others—who’ve populated her stories over the past three decades are absent from the book. In fact, yes, The Things We Never Say seems set in a different universe altogether, one in which Strout’s beloved literary people, Bob et. al, are fictional (CAN YOU IMAGINE!?), because there’s a reference to her main character, Artie Dam, reading a book “about some crotchety old woman from Maine,” which is clearly Olive Kitteridge. “People die of loneliness,” Artie recalls the woman in the book thinking. “It happens all the time.”
But what this quotation reveals is that this latest book is still familiar territory for Strout, territory she’s mined before—the unknowability of other people, even those who are closest to us, how alone we can feel within intimate relationships, the depth of mystery contained within each and every one of us. This is territory that Strout will likely never stop mining either, which is fine with me, because what she writes reads like answers to questions I will never stop asking, and I’m glad she’s wondering too.
Artie Dam is a man akin to Bob Burgess, a man with feelings, many of which he’s unable to express. He’s a beloved high school history teacher and it’s 2024, which is a hard time to be a student of history in the United States of America, to have one’s eyes open to what’s happened and what’s going to happen next. The great heartbreak of his life is a car accident when his son was a teenager that killed his son’s girlfriend, and changed everything for their family, especially the dynamic between Artie and his wife. But then Artie learns something about his past that changes everything he thinks he knows about his family, and Artie has to figure out what happens to that, a problem that’s aligned with questions he keeps asking himself about the nature of free will.
This is a novel in which not much happens at all, or rather it happens in such a way that it’s easy to overlook that everything happens in this book, life, death, betrayal, heartbreak. But also redemption, hope, possibility, (sometimes) connection. This book is wrenching in the same way that being alive is, and similarly it’s so deeply worth the ride.
