SPOILERS
Much as I love Elizabeth Strout, there is a sameness about her books with their liberal-voting middle class characters and East Coast US setting. The Things We Never Say falls into the same category, and as with her other books, the wisdom and compassion that she shows to her characters seem to reflect the life-stage that the author is at herself. In this regard, I tend to see her as a slightly more literary Anne Tyler.
Artie Dam is a middle-aged high-school teacher, married to his wife Evie for over thirty years, with one adult son, Rob. In many ways, he has fallen on his feet financially, as he and his now-deceased sister Maria were the children of a working-class couple, his mother suffering from mental illness. His wife Evie, on the other hand, was the daughter of a wealthy family and now Artie and his wife live in the beach-side house that Evie had inherited from her parents. Not everything had been easy though: Evie had had difficulty conceiving, and their son Rob was driving in a car accident that killed his passenger Heather Morrison. It is probable that Heather had been giving him a blowjob while driving, but neither Artie nor Rob divulged this during the police enquiry. And now, over ten years later and despite career, house and family Artie is unhappy to the point of considering suicide. It is only when he nearly dies in a boating accident that he realizes that he doesn’t really want to die after all, and takes up his life with a renewed sense of purpose.
However, all of this is to be ruptured when his son Rob shows him a letter that Rob had received from Reginald MacDonald, a thin and humorless neighbour with whom, along with his raucous wife Flossie, the family had socialized before Reg died and Flossie moved to Florida to live with her daughter. The letter to Rob, written on Reg’s deathbed, divulged that Reg was actually Rob’s father, conceived after a three month affair after many years of Evie’s infertility. Artie had never suspected in any way that Rob was not his son, although once he found out it became clear that Rob bore absolutely no resemblance to him. Evie, unaware that Rob had received this letter from his biological father, continued the pretense as she had for the past twenty-five years.
Artie is torn between telling Evie that he knows, but subconsciously wants to punish her by holding this knowledge against her. Rob does not tell his mother either, and indeed the relationship between Artie and Rob deepens with the shared knowledge of this betrayal. For a while it seems that infidelity is everywhere. One of Artie’s students Danny Marino is struggling with his own parent’s breakup which, by coincidence Artie learned of when Danny’s father, a plumber, came to fix a tap and ended up sobbing sitting on the bathtub, ruing his ignorance of the affair. A teaching colleague at school, Anne Merrill, confides in Artie that her husband was again ‘straying’, having had an affair some years earlier.
Meanwhile, despite feeling that he has all of this under control, Artie is acting out of character too. He begins shoplifting, but when caught stealing two shirts in a menswear shop, the owner does not report him to the police out of respect for Artie’s position as a schoolteacher. This shoplifting is mirrored by the lightfingeredness of Rachel, a new girlfriend of Rob’s after Rob’s own marriage faltered with the pianist Francesca, whom both Artie and Evie liked much more.
Artie is increasingly struck by the vapidity and hollowness of the interactions of the people around him.
So blind we humans are- so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone. And maybe we have…But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own. Thinking all the while that we can see. (p. 57)
Artie does see his students, as he negotiates their classroom politics. I must say that, for me, the classroom sections were imbued with too much Happy Days/ Donna Parker 1950s glow, with none of the racist and hormonal posturing that pulsed through the classrooms I taught in, and which I am sure has not disappeared today. But as the book goes on, he becomes increasingly jaded with teaching and the lack of authenticity between people.
As the book progresses, Strout begins to intersperse flash forwards in parentheses, telling us as readers that in two years someone will be dead, or that Rob will be out of a job and living in Europe. I quite enjoyed this little bit of literary time-travelling, which seemed less prominent in the first half of the book. The book does have chapters, but they are comprised of consecutive small sections, sometimes separated by asterisks, sometimes not.
By the end of the book, he returns his mind to the question that he had asked earlier: “Why don’t people ever say anything real?”. He has just learned of a neighbour’s attempted suicide- something that he could very easily have done himself in the opening chapter of the book- but now he knows:
…now he knew why. Because to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand. It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now. (p. 180)
The book is very contemporary, dealing with the second election victory of Donald Trump. Strout’s liberal (small-L) political leanings are clear to see, and she does capture well the polarized nature of American society right now. This book is longlisted for the Booker Prize and I’m almost certain that it will be shortlisted. I do wonder about politics in books, though, and whether this will cruel its chances. Literature is always political, but not always so overtly, and authors have the right- even the responsibility- to speak out. But that’s easy when you share the political views that are being expressed: would I feel the same if the book was expressing a conservative, rightwing or libertarian political stance that is the antithesis of what I believe? Would I still see the literary value in the book, or would it distort my reading? After all, I’ve never read an Ayn Rand book, and very much doubt that I would, on principle.
I enjoyed reading the book, but that was because I saw myself mirrored in it: liberal, middle-class, middle-aged (who am I kidding?) It was an up-scale form of comfort reading, but I think that a Booker Prize winner should be more than that.
My rating: 8/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
Read because: Booker Prize 2026 long list.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 