To read Elizabeth Strout is to be reassured that the US is not entirely mad, bad and dangerous.
Over the course of 11 novels, she has become perhaps the single best chronicler of a very particular kind of American life, her books filled with a homely, apple-pie sweetness that conjures a sense of white picket fences.
Behind this façade things may well be falling apart, but everyone ultimately remains decent, even if some of her recurring cast of characters tend towards the irritable – in particular, the magnificent grump Olive Kitteridge, star of two of her books to date, and with cameo appearances in at least two more.
You would never confuse Strout’s style with that of other serious American novelists – Don DeLillo, say, or Jonathan Franzen – but they nevertheless deal in the same preoccupations: how to live side-by-side on an increasingly complicated planet, and still find succour. Unlike those (male) writers, however, whose books – brilliant as they may be – require the reader to wade through at least 600 pages, Strout manages similar with remarkable economy, and no scrimping on impact. You could read this during your daily commute, though be prepared to be profoundly affected if you do.
She has produced novels that do this since her 1998 debut Amy and Isabelle, about a complex mother/daughter relationship, but with her new novel The Things We Never Say, she steps out of her comfort zone, at least a little.
For the first time in a long time, the book does not feature familiar faces (although Olive is referenced in passing, Strout unable to resist the temptation), nor is it set in her usual milieu of Maine, but rather Massachusetts. Not a huge leap, admittedly, but still. It’s also her darkest book by far. Within its slender 203 pages, she unleashes nothing less than a prolonged howl of despair over the current state of the world.
Artie Dam is a high school history teacher whose enthusiasm for his subject makes him popular even among those pupils who rarely glance up from their phones. He is married to Evie, his wife of many years, with whom he has a grown-up son. At the weekends, Artie likes to take his sailing boat out on the bay for a bit of R&R. Despite this seemingly charmed life, Artie has fallen into a deep depression. He is, quite literally, losing the will to live. The US’s ongoing political situation has hardly helped.
“The dread of the upcoming presidential election [made] him feel as if a noose was tightening around his neck,” Strout writes. “What a hell of a mess this country is headed for. And all we are doing is just standing around fiddling while Rome burns.”
He tries to talk to his wife about his concerns, but Evie has her own preoccupations. “He had seen it in her eyes – after their being married for so many years – that she was no longer interested.”
Quietly, because Artie isn’t the type to bother folk, he decides to kill himself. Luck is on his side. While sailing his boat in the bay one day, he falls into the water, but is surprised to find that survival instinct forces him to swim, not sink.
When someone comes to his aid, another middle-aged man with reasons for his own lethargy, they become firm friends, both hoping that in each other they might vanquish loneliness. Loneliness, Artie believes, is our inescapable fate. “Why don’t people ever say anything real? Because nobody wanted to know. It was a private thing, to be alive. He understood this now.”
In many ways, The Things We Never Say is quintessential Strout. Like 2016’s My Name Is Lucy Barton and 2021’s Oh William!, which also gently grappled with existential themes, it is sad but lovely, full of appealing characters and of neighbours being neighbourly while trading in the kind of gossipy asides that require exclamation marks.
While it is true to say that the old-fashioned way in which she writes tends to bleed into her characters’ personalities, and render them similarly antiquated – Artie, for example, is just 57, but the way Strout dresses him and has him behave makes him seem closer to 77 – she is also unafraid to excavate the deepest of feelings, where true darkness lies.
Everyone surrounding Artie is comparably adrift: colleagues, neighbours, his students. Clearly, these are hard times. Suicide exists both as ideation and as a necessary obligation for those who feel they can no longer exist in a world gone irrevocably bad, exacerbated, each believes, by the president and his enablers. (While Trump is never mentioned by name, he suffuses every page of a book that might not find favour with Maga.)
If all this makes The Things We Never Say sound overwhelmingly bleak, then, well, it is. But it is also radiant with hope, with empathy, a plea for kindness and understanding – those little things that really do count. The scene in which Artie, increasingly lost, finds himself shoplifting is the most moving thing that I, personally, have read in fiction in a long time. Strout can break your heart, then put it back together again.
Later, a student tells Artie of her optimism, despite everything. “I know this sounds stupid, but I want to help people. I hope there can be world peace, and I want to do my part.”
This could feel a little trite coming from a lesser author, but such is the tightrope Elizabeth Strout walks. Despite her perpetual air of genteel timidity, she’s a fearless writer.
Those who crave literature that offers even a glimmer of light at the end of a tunnel strewn with bin fires need look no further. At 70 years old, this quiet marvel has just delivered her masterpiece – one in which she skewers modern America more powerfully, and certainly more succinctly, than any of her peers.
‘The Things We Never Say’ by Elizabeth Strout is published by Viking, £18.99
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