Strout’s latest novel would be a worthy Booker Prize winner
The latest novel from Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say, is her third to make the long list for the Booker Prize. It may be that this is the one that finally wins it. She’s been a name since her debut novel, Amy and Isabelle, in 1998 and each release has added to her stellar reputation. This is her eleventh full-length novel, and it’s magnificent. It’s a departure from her familiar cast of characters – this one focuses on Artie Dam, a 57 year old teacher in a coastal town in Massachusetts. It’s a gentle but unswerving portrait of a life and all of its connections – work, family and friends. Strout has an uncanny ability to weave the most unpromising, dull domestic details, the details that make up real people’s lives, into something absolutely compelling.
Artie is one of life’s good guys. You can see that in Strout’s presentation of his approach to teaching and his students, in particular the way he models how to be a decent human being in the way he behaves, his words and actions. He is the epitome of fairness, talks to his students with respect, treating them first and foremost as fellow human beings. The result of this instinctively kind approach is to inspire love. Two of his students in particular, Danny and Rhonda think that Artie has rescued them from their very different predicaments. Artie is never fully aware of that, but Strout’s resurrection of the very old-fashioned but immensely powerful third person omniscient narrator means that we, the readers, are. It’s an awareness that lends a heroic aura to Artie. It’s a little guy heroic aura rather than a classical one, but Strout clearly places much more value on one and not the other.
Strout’s depiction of Artie’s relationship with his son Rob is one which all parents will recognise and envy – recognise the ongoing worry and the distance that adulthood brings, and envy the genuine quality of their communication as time passes. His wife Flossie also plays a big part in the novel. At first it seems that this is a long standing marriage that has settled into a comfortable and mutually supportive relationship. Strout, as ever, is excellent on the small details of life that glue people together and equally good at dropping bombshells that disrupt what she has painstakingly created.
All of these small lives (and she includes herself and her readers in that definition) are threaded through with major tragedies, high emotion and cataclysmic events. Just when you think that it is just going to be a small novel about small things, (with its pleasures and frustrations) it becomes much more than that. Big things happen, secrets are spilled and lives are changed. And if that’s not enough, her treatment of the 2024 Presidential election and the way that all of the main cast of characters worry about what is happening to America through the Trump and MAGA phenomenon is brilliant: subtle, realistic, thoughtful.
It’s an outstanding meditation on the gap between everyone’s rich internal lives, and what we choose to share with the people around us. To quote (yet again) the great Elvis Costello, “It’s the damage that we do and never know, it’s the words that we don’t say that scare me so.” As the title suggests, Artie decides to keep all of his most challenging thoughts to himself so as not to disrupt his own life and that of those around him. Whether you think he’s right or wrong, it’s a dilemma that most people will find familiar and one which generates drama, tension and high emotion. Artie’s life and its attendant secrets will linger long after you’ve finished this short but outstanding novel.
The Old Grey Owl 