The Things We Never Say: A Novel

Well written but a bit of a political statement and downer.

Artie is a good man, a loving father and an inspirational history teacher, adrift in this Trumpian dystopia. I found the tale insightful and deeply moving.

Lovely tale of a thoughtful history teacher Dam Dam and his pupils, colleagues, friends and family set around Trumps election. Very current

“Why don’t people ever say anything real?” Artie asks this early in Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, and I kept thinking about this question long after I finished the book. Artie is a schoolteacher beloved by his students and community who seems to be searching for something deeper than the ordinary exchanges of everyday life. At a party, he asks a friend about free will. His friend ignores him and walks away. Later, Artie asks his wife why no one says anything real anymore. And this is what Strout seems so interested in throughout the novel: how little we actually know about the people standing beside us. There are secrets everywhere. Affairs. Depression. Grief. Resentments. Histories. Half-truths. Things omitted because someone believes the truth would cause more harm than good. People lying to each other, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because they simply don’t know how to say what is actually happening inside them. At one point, a student of Artie’s discovers what Strout calls the secrets of adults: that they have them, and that they are serious and sad. Yes. Adults are walking around carrying entire lives inside themselves. Artie remembers his sister Maria as a child, catching her in the cellar eating confectioners’ sugar straight from the bag with a spoon. “All she was looking for was a little sweetness.” That sentence made me so sad. Artie grows up lonely, and that loneliness follows him into adulthood. Even surrounded by people who love him, that loneliness does not dissipate. There is a Jungian idea running through the novel that secrets and loneliness are intertwined. The more we conceal, the more isolated we become. That idea feels familiar to me; the belief that real inner work requires us to become more honest about what is actually happening inside us. Maybe that is why Artie affects me so much. He wants people to say something real. He asks his daughter-in-law what she sees when she plays the piano and she tells him she is searching for God. “Do you find him?” “Sometimes.” There is so much tenderness in that exchange. Artie is always searching for something he can’t quite name. And the thing about Artie is, that while he is so desperately lonely, he is also profoundly connected to other people. He touches lives without realizing it. His students love him. His family loves him. People remember him. His relationships with two of his best friends are meaningful because with them he can be truly himself. And he loves them for it. And still, Artie feels alone. This is what devastated me the most about the novel. We never know how we appear to other people. We don’t know who felt seen by us when we weren’t trying to see anyone. We don’t know whose life we changed simply by showing up. We don’t know who loves us quietly. And we certainly don’t know the private battles being fought by the people standing next to us. Strout writes that Artie was beginning to understand the “multitudinous aspect of people.” Every person, he realizes, contains a vast and unknowable universe. Every person is a universe. And we only ever get pieces. There is a moment when Artie is out to dinner with a friend and they are laughing, but what is coming up through him is not remotely laughter. It is some enormous emotion that has take the physical form of laughter because he cannot contain it any other way. Not because anything was funny. But sometimes the body doesn’t know how to carry what the heart is holding. I think that’s what Artie was doing. Trying to carry it. All of it. And trying to say something real to anyone that would listen. WEARY. That is the word I wrote in my notes after finishing. I felt grief. Not the sharp grief of a single loss, but something heavier. A sadness that feels almost physical. “Whatever exaltation was available to my heart was available no more.” There is something about the finality of that sentence. Not simply I am sad now, but the feeling that a particular capacity for joy has disappeared. That sentence destroyed me. And maybe that is what I am grieving when I think about Artie. That he didn’t know he was loved. Maybe that is one of the cruelest things about being alive. We never know the full circumference of our own existence. We never know who is standing beside us waiting for us to say something real. Because it really is a private thing to be alive. We can love each other desperately and still never full know each other. We can spend our entire lives reaching across that distance. And sometimes, if we are lucky, someone reaches back.

Loved it as I do everything she writes.