The Things We Never Say - Elizabeth Strout
I finished this in bed last night, having read the whole thing in a single day, and I've spent the time since trying to work out how I actually feel about it. I still haven't fully managed it. In my experience that's usually a good sign rather than a bad one. If I can't articulate my feelings about a book immediately, it normally means it's still gestating somewhere in the back of my head, and that it's going to stick around for a while.
I'd never read any Elizabeth Strout before this, and what a way to be introduced to her. The prose is tender and quiet and restrained in a way that I found completely absorbing. She's remarkable at internality. I don't think I've ever felt more inside a character's head, inside their thoughts and their specific little emotional weather systems, than I did here. There are characters we only spend a couple of paragraphs with, seen entirely through someone else's eyes, and somehow you still feel like you know them properly.
The title earns its place. This is very much a book about the things we don't say. The main character, Artie, spends a lot of the novel asking why people don't say the real things, why so much of life is small talk, why we so rarely talk about what actually matters. Over the course of the book he starts to work it out, despite being a man in his fifties who probably should have worked it out a long time ago. And as he goes on that journey, the novel itself starts doing the same thing. It begins as something close to a coming-of-age story, oddly enough, for a man well into middle age, and by the end it's explicitly grappling with the Trump administration, explicitly grappling with what's happening in Gaza.
The politics start subtle and build, almost without you noticing, until by the final stretch I found myself sitting there thinking that this felt genuinely full on. I wasn't sure how I felt about that shift within the novel. And then I realised that not being sure is rather the point.
There were a few small moments near the end where I wondered whether I fully align with Strout politically, and I want to stress these were very small moments. There's one where Artie is gently corrected for referring to his class as "boys and girls," told that maybe not everyone in the room fits neatly into either category, and his reaction reads as slightly mocking. Maybe. I don't know if that's Artie's reaction or if it's Strout's own view sneaking onto the page. It's a throwaway line, really, not something worth getting fixated on, but I think that ambiguity is sort of the whole exercise of the book.
Later on we learn that someone genuinely important to Artie, a relationship he's spent the whole novel building carefully and warmly, is probably a Trump supporter. Arty's response is to quietly decide they'll just never bring up politics again, and again I'm unsure if this is Strout putting her own politics on display. It's certainly a very American Liberal, "let's all just get along", kind of viewpoint.
On the surface this is another literary novel about a middle-aged male teacher having a quiet crisis of identity, which is a shelf that's fairly crowded already. But there's so much happening underneath that surface that the familiarity barely matters. I've rambled through this review without really landing anywhere conclusive, and I think that's exactly what I love about books like this. I suspect I'll be turning this one over in my head for a long time yet.
If you've read The Things We Never Say, I'd love to know what you made of it, because I think I could talk about this one for hours and still not fully get to the bottom of it.