In Elizabeth Strout’s Booker-shortlisted novel, The Things We Never Say, we are let into an America in peril, as the world undergoes a change where recovery is anything but possible. This is Strout drifting away from her Amgash and Olive Kitteridge series that she had been at since 2008. After writing about Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge for 18 years spanning over seven books, Strout has brought to her readers Artie Dam, a man to floor its audience as much as her women have.
Set by the Massachusetts Bay, the novel begins with Artie’s friend Flossie departing to live with her daughter in Ohio. She tells Artie, “Stay jovial, please, Artie! Just promise me that. Please stay your old jovial self.” He is a history teacher at the local school who works as a coach too. He loves his job, and it shows in the creative ways he engages his students. However, readers familiar with Strout will know already that 57-year-old Artie will be anything but jovial as Flossie leaves and life unfolds for Artie in the town.
Strout captures one’s predicament remarkably well, conveying the many ways in which the world defines whom we recognise and whom we don’t
Strout has a way of writing about marriages and families. Unlike Anne Tyler’s Baltimorean families, which are constructed and reconstructed through arrivals and departures of family members, Strout focuses on family that is. Her stories are cohered in the deep histories and psychological makeup of deconstructing the family as a whole through its members. Artie has been married to Evie for more than thirty years now. They have a son—Rob, who works as a software engineer and stays with his wife. Many years ago, when Rob had just graduated from school, he had an accident. In that tragedy, Rob’s girlfriend had died, and the family was thrown into an abyss. But the umbra that Artie’s family lives in is not limited to this accident. As the novel progresses, Artie learns of a truth in his family he’s been deprived of all his life. He begins to see his life as a lie, learning of it at 57. Strout does a marvellous job at uncovering the life of this American family, with the cracks showing and yet a suture holding them together. Through her characters, Strout investigates what makes the American family: the notions of independence, muddled togetherness, and the economy of blood and cultural recognition.
The novel is cognizant of the political forces that continuously determine her characters. Set in the upcoming US Presidential Election of 2024, the novel addresses the divisions America saw between the political sentiments of its citizens. Without ever naming Donald Trump, Strout offers a visceral portrait of what it is to be alive in a regime so taken by violence of speech and action. Artie is worried about the state of his country if that man were allowed to be the President once again. He also realises that not all his friends share similar political opinions. He befriends Ken, a man who saved Artie from drowning once. They speak with love and kindness with each other, but they never get around to discussing the war in Gaza, Ukraine, and US politics. When Artie gets to know that he might be of the faction he is wary of, he is caught in a fix. Artie’s response to this revelation is palpable in countries across the world today, where friendships and relationships are battered by oppositional ideologies. Strout captures one’s predicament remarkably well, conveying the many ways in which the world defines whom we recognise and whom we don’t.
As sensible and heartbreaking as Artie may be, he is so much like Lucy Barton that one cannot help but wonder at the similarities. They feel about the world deeply. They think about people and their trauma with force. They recognise silence. They bear pain, both familial and political. On the one hand, this is reassuring and makes the reader settle all too easily with Artie. On the other hand, it can leave the reader wanting for a character that is original and peculiar in his own ways.
The driving curiosity of Artie has been about ‘free will’. Throughout the novel, he asks his students, colleagues, friends, and family about it, and yet nobody gives an answer as to what having free will could be. As the new State comes to power in America, countries are bombed, children starve in Gaza, and Artie’s son leaves him to settle in Belgium, Artie sees the mirage of free will he had been trying to seek through his profession and his acts of kindness. Strout makes her readers lean into him and then breaks them, as the answer to this question remains one of the things we never say to each other.