THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY, by Elizabeth Strout
A loss of innocence is possible at any age, but the pain of disillusionment can have a silver lining: the opportunity to live with a deeper understanding of reality. Artie Dam, the 57-year-old protagonist of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel, “The Things We Never Say,” is depressed yet outwardly genial, blind to a secret buried in his own past — until he isn’t.
A high school history teacher in coastal Massachusetts, Artie begins the book trying to figure out a way to kill himself that will appear accidental. The root of his suicidal ideation is “an accretion of loneliness,” Strout writes, rather than any one thing in particular: The 2024 presidential election looms; the pandemic has left his students quieter and more anxious than they used to be; his best friend, a blowzy widow named Flossie, has moved away; his adult son, Rob, has grown distant; his wife of 34 years, Evie, finds him “soft”; small talk at a party seems hopelessly false. Artie keeps asking people if they believe free will exists, but nobody wants to engage. “I am lonely enough to die,” he thinks.
Meanwhile, a secret has been saturating his life like an undetected but explosive gas. About midway through the book — after a near-fatal sailing accident has dispelled Artie’s suicidal impulses — someone close to Artie reveals the truth, and nothing will ever be as it was.
The novel’s back half tracks the complex fallout while circling in and out of the past. Some consequences are what one would expect (re-evaluation of relationships), while others are less foreseeable (Artie takes up shoplifting).
“The Things We Never Say” rewards rereading, as the whole story is present, though disguised, from the beginning. Curious details and offbeat observations in the early chapters are pieces of a puzzle, their significance clear only after viewing the whole. Often it’s annoying when an author withholds information, but Strout’s style is so casual and airy and her storytelling so assured that her omissions feel deft and natural rather than manipulative. Being along for the ride is a pleasure.
The narrative oscillates gently among various points of view in the past and present, with occasional omniscient asides that are often wise and sometimes clunky. “No matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others,” Strout writes. “This was true for Artie Dam.” Well, yes. This theme, richly present in the narrative, doesn’t need to be articulated, whereas a related, far cleaner observation later on — “It was a private thing, to be alive” — hits with greater impact because of that one interesting, surprising word: private.
Strout excels at creating a sense of things coming together. Within her novels, scenes and tangents and remembered incidents gradually coalesce into collective meaning like found objects being woven into a bird’s nest. And across her oeuvre, she brings her characters together in Marvel-esque crossovers. In leaving behind the fictional town of Crosby, Maine — the nexus of Strout’s extended universe — “The Things We Never Say” has the feeling of a fresh start, though many of Strout’s prevailing preoccupations remain: social class, suicide, disappointment between parents and children, secret loves, gentle husbands with tough-cookie wives, and our current political moment.
This last element is tricky in fiction. The news cycle careens too quickly to keep up with on a daily basis, let alone on the timetable required to publish a book, and the Trump era seems to defy artistic rendering, maybe because descriptions of its horrors and absurdities have a way of feeling both woefully inadequate and irritatingly overwrought.
A whole page in the middle of “The Things We Never Say” is devoted to two sentences, floating in empty space: “The election came and went. Half of the country was stunned, the other half jubilant.” Not untrue, but is such an obvious observation worth making? An ill-advised epilogue begins with hopelessly out-of-date references to Alligator Alcatraz and President Trump’s military birthday parade. “I think, even for citizens,” Rob says to Artie, “I can see a time when due process just no longer exists. For any of us. Here.” Strout’s (justifiable) fear and anger are palpable, but rather than being cathartic, their expression through these characters ends up feeling, as Artie’s students might say, cringe.
On the other hand, there’s a poignancy to the way Strout sets Artie’s personal disillusionment against the backdrop of a larger grief: the helplessness of watching as smugly vaunted American systems and institutions — checks and balances, for example — crumble under the stupidity, greed and malevolence they were meant to protect against. Just as his discovery of the family secret changes Artie’s understanding of the past, present and future, so too has the Trump era shattered the complacent, even willful, innocence of millions of Americans. It hurts to have the scales fall from your eyes, but if rebuilding can ever happen, it has to start from a place of truth.
THE THINGS WE NEVER SAY | By Elizabeth Strout | Random House | 203 pp. | $29
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