The Things We Never Say marks a new direction for Elizabeth Strout.

Gone are the landscapes of rural Illinois and coastal Maine that featured so prominently in her previous 11 novels. Gone too are the characters of Lucy Barton, Olive Ketteridge and Bob Burgess whose connected lives earned Strout a Pullitzer Prize, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a Booker Prize shortlisting.

Elizabeth Strout fans can rest easy however. Though The Things We Never Say has a new setting — a coastal Massachusetts community — and a new central character— history teacher Artie Dam — its style is still unmistakably Elizabeth Strout’s.

The same episodic form of narrative. The same play with time frames, often dipping into the past and sometimes leaping into the future. And the same mix of conversations between the main character, their friends, neighbours and family members and more reflective passages in which they consider their lives and the world around them.

This is a novel focused on Artie Dam, a man who to all outward appearances, has a happy, fulfilling life. He loves spending time with his students, expanding their minds, showing them possibilities for their future and teaching them strategies on how to cope with life’s challenges. He has a stable marriage, chats to neighbours, makes small talk at parties and at weekends loves to sail through Massachusetts Bay.

But in fact Artie is struggling. At home he feels more and more distant from his wife. At school, the Covid pandemic has left his students more fearful and anxious about the future. And there’s the imminent presidential election with a result which fills him with dread.

Deep down, Artie is lonely, adrift from a world that’s becoming harder and harder to understand. Just when his loneliness threatens to overwhelm him, to the extent he considers how best to arrange his death, he discovers a secret held back from him for decades. Once learned, Artie has to find a new path through life and reconsider his relationships.

The Things We Never Say is an exploration of loneliness and the role played by communication between individuals.

Why, Artie wonders, do we know so little about one another, even people who are close to us? Why do the people he knows “never say anything real.”

One answer comes from the omniscient narrator:

All of us have a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others.

It’s only when Artie begins to be more open and real himself and opens up about issues not normally articulated (like free will), that he finds peace.

This is a quietly reflective novel about the silences and gaps that can happen even between close friends, spouses and children. Artie discovers that friendships he once valued no longer sustain him, their place taken by a stranger.

It’s an engaging novel though not to the same extent as the Lucy Barton & olive Ketteridge books. What marred my enjoyment was Strout’s tendency to interrupt the flow of the narrative with extraneous details.

For example, after a conversation between Artie and the headmaster (Hoover Lakeland), we learn:

Two years from now, Hoover Lakeland would stay late at school one day and when only the janitor was in the building, Hoover would take a pistol rom a desk drawer in his office and shoot himself in the head. Years later it would be revealed that he had been under investigation by the FBI.

Yes it fits in with the theme as an example of how unknowable someone can be, but it didn’t add materially to the novel. I hope this doesn’t become a thing in her future books.

The Things we Never Say has been shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. Will it win? I suspect not — it’s too mainstream in theme and style for the current judges based on their other shortlist choices.