The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
At the beginning of Elizabeth Strout’s bracing novel The Things We Never Say, Artie Dam knows the world is magnificent, yet he doesn’t feel much of anything. On paper the details of his life look pretty good. True, he’s on the dark side of 50, but he’s also a popular high school history teacher living in a fine seaside house on the coast of Massachusetts. He even has a sailboat he takes out every chance he gets. Both the house and the boat are the result of his marrying up in station. And while he loves his wife, Evie, he seems more excited catching a glimpse of his sailboat—moored on the sparkling sea—when walking through the house than he is sitting down for a perfunctory dinner with Evie.
Artie also thinks the world of Rob, his grown son. But Rob’s history is what changed everyone’s trajectory. After a teenage Rob was in a car accident that resulted in the death of his girlfriend, life went on for the Dams. But the event also nudged Rob, Evie, and Artie away from each other. The change wasn’t dramatic. An outside observer probably wouldn’t notice any change at all. But the Dams had settled on their own separate branches, each branch moving away from the center.
So this is how we find Artie wanting to end his life without looking as though he intentionally did so. It was a slow accretion of events—some (most, actually) quite banal—that led to this decision. It was also one (unintentional) near-death sailing accident that led Artie to reclaim his will to live.
This is where Strout grabs the reader, as it’s not a simple joie de vivre rebirth for Artie. After his accident, Artie learns of a family secret that’s so seismic he’s unsure how to outwardly manifest what he’s learned. Strout’s understated writing is clever, for the revealed secret simultaneously casts shadows and explains earlier events that the reader didn’t particularly question at the time.
Prior to learning of this secret, Artie was already a level-headed guy. When a former neighbor used to casually insult him, for example, Artie shrugged it off, attributing such boorish behavior to a “poverty of spirit.” And he well knew Evie had her own private sorrows. Post-secret, he’s still quite understanding, but he’s now developed a penchant for shoplifting. Go figure. Also, in an instant, here’s how he now sees Evie: “When he looked at her, and he would never forget this, he saw, at the same time, a face more familiar to him than his own and the eyes of a stranger.”
These events happen under the umbrella of the last presidential election. So not only is Artie roiling for personal reasons, he’s trying to make sense of current political realities. It’s not as though he can ignore them either, for they play out in his classroom. If he’s not in angry defiance, he’s offering up platitudes to his class he doesn’t seem to believe. However, he can be somewhat forgiven. Something is happening that he didn’t think would ever happen. He spent his entire career teaching U.S. history against the backdrop of accepted political norms and institutional continuity. When the norms and institutions are disregarded and attacked, Artie doesn’t have adequate words for his students, because he’s clearly shaken.
In this short novel, Strout effectively presents brief point-of-view interludes throughout. In just a few sentences we come to know how a character, many years hence, remembers another character. An engaging and haunting read, this story won’t be leaving the forefront of my mind anytime soon. What Artie is experiencing also reveals a history of private pain in others. He’ll suddenly recall short moments that pointed to more than he knew at the time, moments when others close to him were struggling and he just didn’t see it. And he didn’t see it because others either didn’t know how to voice it or were afraid that expressing it would change everything. Or more painful still: he chose not to see it. At one point Artie concludes, “It was a private thing, to be alive.”
Review by Jason Sullivan
