Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say (Random House, May 5, 2026, longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize) follows Artie Dam, a fifty-seven-year-old high school history teacher in a coastal Massachusetts town, through the summer and fall of 2024. Outwardly Artie has all the makings of a good life, a thirty-year marriage, a house, a son he is proud of, a beloved career, a sailboat,  and inwardly he is desolate. The novel is at once a portrait of loneliness, a study of class and marriage, and a record of a country’s drift toward fascism.

(SPOILER ALERT: this post discusses the novel’s central secret.)

Our conversation began with an admission by several of us that we had read this most recent Elizabeth Strout novel early this summer, then forgotten the details, and had to read it a second time to prepare for our discussion. I suggested that perhaps our forgetfulness was because Strout captures our current political climate so well. But others quickly disagreed with me and began instead to discuss Artie. In retrospect, I wonder whether our forgetfulness may have been rooted in the sadness we felt as Artie, the outstanding teacher of the year, familiar to us, was gradually worn down, deeply depressed.

A chronological plot summary does not do justice to this seemingly simple story of a beloved high school history teacher, a man with a big heart and a love of the sea, who increasingly wonders whether there is such a thing as free will. Strout gives the reader a sense of what is coming for Artie, foretelling his future and then backing up to the present storyline. As a historian, he is acutely aware of his country’s increasing fascism. On the personal level, he is uncomfortable living in his wife’s inherited home on a private street among wealthy neighbors he considers snobs.

He frequently remembers his own parents with love and tenderness. An unforgettable scene in the novel — and a recurring image for Artie — is that of his sister Maria in the cellar of their basement apartment, eating confectioners’ sugar from a jar with a spoon, and his recognition of how hungry she was for sweetness in her life. He feels a tenderness for his mentally ill mother, and we see how that tenderness informs his relations with his most troubled students.

Artie is then confronted by the secrets of his wife, Evie, who lied to him about their son Rob’s paternity, and her relationship with one of their social group, Reginald, an intellectually pretentious man Artie deeply disliked and did not respect. Artie and Reginald’s wife Flossie had a warm but non-erotic friendship.

On his deathbed, Reginald sent a letter to Rob that reveals the affair and directs him to a lab for DNA proof of his paternity. Rob shares the information with Artie, and while their connection strengthens,  neither of them ever tell Evie who discovers the letter among Artie’s belongings after he dies.

We all loved Artie as a character, and most of our discussion focused on him: as a teacher, as a parent, as a friend. The novel is too intimate and too timely to be easily labeled with a list of topics, though it is certainly about class, about marriage, about parenting, and about the things that prevent people from really knowing one another, including secrets, a  theme we saw in the last book as well. 

One difference in this book is that the personal complications are aligned specifically with the disillusionment of a man who has lost his faith and trust both as an individual, in the institution of marriage, and the reality of what one presumes of one’s neighbors or community who he may know are flawed, but does not presume to be as brittle or selfish as they are. 

He is a historian whose keen awareness of the ways the country faces real destruction combines with this personal shock to fundamentally shake his core sense of identity. 

He is rescued from a sailing accident by a person whose political views are an anathema to him. It is these complications which have always existed and which Strout reveals in their current attenuated state, one that many of us recognize as we also often want to escape.

Midway through our discussion we were joined by a new member, who agreed that she loved the book and plans to come back because of our interesting book list, one co-created by all of us from books we recommended after first reading them.

Stay tuned for our next read: The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot by Marianne Cronin

Posted on by Kirsten T. Saxton

Senior Book Chat January 2025

Tell Me Everything (2024) by Elizabeth Strout

“A generous, compassionate novel about the human need for connection, understanding and love, and the damage that occurs when those things are denied.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters — Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and others. In this novel, the community must navigate a shocking crime in their midst.

Our book group previously had read Strout’s Olive Kitteridge at my suggestion. I had taught the book at Mills, and the students found the stories engaging and thought provoking. The book group agreed, and we eagerly returned to Strout’s characters in Olive, Again, Oh, William, and Lucy by the Sea, so when we saw the announcement of Tell Me Everything, we immediately added it to our fall 2024 reading list. We anticipated Strout’s familiar conversational style, her quirky characters, with a central plot threading together all the bits and pieces. dWe were surprised by the larger cast of characters, the multiple plot lines, and we were a little disappointed.

We had not been put off by large casts of characters or multiple plot lines in other books, and we wondered why this book, well reviewed as the Chronicle quote above indicates, did not sit well with us.

Perhaps we expected her more familiar form. Unlike novelists whose books do not return to the same places or characters, Strout’s connected novels, while not formally a series, create a fictional world that invites readers to return to a place they know well, offering new surprises and plots but within an expected structure. So the shift in structure, as it did not have a clear point–was not obviously making an argument via form–put us off a bit.

We also had feelings about the characters’ fates. We have leaned into novels with tragic or or unhappy outcomes, but here we were invested in the characters across a series of stories, and so our reactions and expectations differed. Perhaps we were perplexed by the choice to make Lucy remarry William, whom none of us really like. One group member wondered why she built up the intimacy between Lucy and her friend Bob Burgess only to alter it so abruptly. We speculated that Lucy married William to force herself to loosen the ties to Bob. Our reaction, as if these are people we know, is fascinating to consider. For example, long after my initial reading and weeks after the group discussion, I still feel the initial burst of satisfaction I had when Olive’s good friend in the memory care section of their shared nursing home defied her daughter’s insistence to move across the country near family and insisted she needed/wanted to stay close to her best friend, Olive.

Strout’s characters always feel “real,” and her writing is always strong, but I wonder about the dangers of writing a series of linked novels, as well as the pleasures. I did not, finally, enjoy this novel nearly as much as the previous ones. I’d love to know what you think!