Elizabeth Strout introduces new characters in her melancholy new novel

FICTION
The Things We Never Say
Elizabeth Strout
Viking Fiction, $35

It is apt that Elizabeth Strout’s new novel The Things We Never Say begins with a quote from Carl Jung about the shadow self, as the book is very much concerned with the things people keep hidden. Though a departure from Strout’s Olive Kitteridge/Lucy Barton universe – the two characters who have featured in her novels now for decades – in its deep psychological exploration of apparently ordinary individuals, The Things We Never Say is in very familiar territory for Strout.

It centres on Artie Dam, an ageing history teacher who lives in Massachusetts Bay with his wife Evie. As the novel opens, and following the departure of his dear friend Flossie, Artie faces a kind of existential malaise, though nothing specific seems wrong; he wishes himself dead, without actively wanting to take his own life. Then Artie falls from his sailboat, blacks out and is rescued by a stranger in a motorboat. In the process he rediscovers his will to live. He forms a new connection with his son, who is himself in the process of separating from his wife, despite the lack of any apparent conflict between them.

The Things We Never Say is very much cut from the same cloth as Strout’s previous novels, with particular stylistic links to her most recent novel Tell Me Everything. Similarly narrated by a floating, omniscient voice, the characters are familiar: ageing, white, middle-class professionals whose children have grown up and, as their lives slow down, have more time for self-reflection. They are piecing themselves together from their pasts and observing the complexities of human existence. Artie reflects on the time he caught his sister Maria hiding and eating from a bag of confectionery sugar with a “look of vast guilt and fear on her white-streaked face”. Evie, a counsellor, observes about one patient’s desire to come clean about an extra-marital affair that “living honestly comes in many different forms”.

The crux of the novel is the uncovering of a family secret, one that involved a deception so complete that Artie at first has trouble believing it, but then comes to understand he always had an unconscious awareness of it. This situation causes Artie to behave erratically, as he observes, “We have always sat in this room with this huge thing silently between us.” Except that for 28 years he had been unaware of it.

Though politics has found its way into many of Strout’s recent novels, via oblique references to Trump supporters and refugees, The Things We Never Say is the most overtly political of all of them. Though Trump is never named, he is clearly referenced, including being labelled a “lunatic”. In the course of re-enacting the American Civil War with his students and assigning roles, Artie is forced to allocate confederate soldiers to students who want to play them. On a page that is otherwise blank, almost exactly halfway through the book, Strout writes, “The election came and went. Half of the country stunned, the other half jubilant.”

Politics, she observes, has created deeply personal rifts in American society. Even a fight at a high-school soccer match involving both parents and students seems symptomatic of a lack of tolerance for different perspectives.

This is easily the most melancholy of all Strout’s books, and without the dark humour of Olive Kitteridge (a book that Evie seems to have read) there are genuine moments of despair. The optimism and hope that was a feature of the Lucy Barton books is striking in its absence. The only real consolation is the various small kindnesses: for example, Artie, a truly caring man, goes out of his way to empower his students to pursue their dreams, telling one student who demonstrates an astute reading of Othello that he should pursue college instead of working at his father’s plumbing business.

Deeply elegiac though it is, The Things We Never Say is full of profound and penetrating insight into people. Still, I did miss that spark that has run through Strout’s more recent fiction, that sense that despite pain and loss, and aided only by the ability to imagine our way into the lives of others, anything remains possible.

Gretchen Shirm’s most recent novel, Out of the Woods, was shortlisted for The Age Book of The Year.

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