The Things We Never Say
By Elizabeth Strout
Random House, May 2026, 224pp.
The Short of It:
Not what I expected.
The Rest of It:
“Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation.”
I love Strout and have read and loved so many of her books, so I have to be honest that this one fell a little short for me. Artie is a genuinely nice guy, and I appreciated his vulnerability, but he never quite had that special something that makes Strout’s characters so deeply endearing and memorable.
He can be a little whiny, and his wife is truly awful. I could absolutely relate to his being blindsided by the secret she had been keeping from him, but the revelation was not quite enough to carry me through the story. I kept reading because it’s Strout, and there were still moments of emotional insight and quiet sadness that worked for me. Even so, I found myself setting the book aside more than once because the story felt a little heavy and, at times, depressing.
I do not shy away from difficult or melancholy books, but Artie was missing that heroic quality that makes you root for a character and feel deeply pulled into his journey. This was still a thoughtful, well-written novel, but it was just okay for me, especially compared with Strout’s other work.
Source: Borrowed
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