Book review: Elizabeth Strout packs a world into a small canvas

As a general reader with no particular skills in literary criticism, I am going to chance my arm in this review. I’ll be making claims that I have probably no right to make apart from my long years of reading and thinking.

It might be claimed that at present, the richest, most moving, and most engaging novels are coming from Ireland. I am thinking of writers like Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín and Niall Williams. Tóibín, though living in America, focuses some of his novels on the Irish town of Enniscorthy, where he grew up. In Brooklyn  and Long Island, he writes of a young woman who escapes Enniscorthy which she finds insular, introspective and stifling.  Williams creates a fictional village in the west of Ireland, Faha. Two of his novels, This Is Happiness and Time of the Child, explore, intensely, the lives of some of the villagers with warmth and love.

For me, though, Claire Keegan is the stand-out writer of the three. Her novel, Small Things Like These, is exquisite. It is a story that can horrify, terrify and uplift. Evil stalks its pages in a Magdalene laundry, but the goodness and kindness of the main character enrich the reader. It is a book to reread, and the movie of the book is equally excellent. Claire Keegan’s novels, in fact, novellas are short and beautifully controlled every word, every sentence counts.

In this, she reminds me of the American writer, Elizabeth Strout, who also writes short, gentle gems, several set in the same American village with the same cast of characters. Two of those characters, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, appear again and again, and the reader comes to know them well: their fears and anxieties, their loves and their happiness, their absorbing strength.

The Things We Never Say leaves this fictional world, though employing the same writerly mechanisms: brevity, intensity, sharp focus, concentration, and examination of the problems of being human. The main character, Artie Dam, married to Evie, with an adult son, Rob, is an honoured History teacher in an American public school. He takes out the prize as Massachusetts Teacher Of the Year and rightly so. He and Evie live in a town, unnamed, on a bay on the coast of Massachusetts. Artie has a sailboat there which he uses regularly except in winter.

Known to his students as Damn-Dam and addressed in class as such, Artie gives lessons in life as much as lessons in History. He is an innovative, inventive teacher, encouraging the use of primary sources by his students. Artie loves each crop of students who come into his classroom. He listens to them; he engages with them as they explore the past together. He helps them, most of them, to grow into decent human beings.

One of them, Danny Marino, is a troubled boy who pushes the boundaries. When Danny mocks a somewhat awkward student, Rhonda, Damn-Dam falls on him like a ton of bricks, humiliating Danny but teaching him a valuable lesson.  When Danny makes a shocking blunder in the school that might have seen him in deep trouble, Artie Dam steps in to help him, gaining Danny’s affection and respect.

While readers will enjoy and admire Artie in the classroom, the novel’s focus is elsewhere. Artie is lonely in his marriage to Evie, though they have been married for nearly thirty years, and he is depressed. He dreams of taking his own life but can’t see the way to do it. But then he is thrown a curve-ball when, in a boating mishap – he is a keen and experienced sailor – he very nearly dies. He learns that, most certainly, he does not want to die.

Artie makes a very good friend of the man who saved his life, Ken Moynihan; they eat together regularly at Spuds’ Bar and Grill (this is an American novel after all), but he is astonished when told that Moynihan is a strong supporter and admirer of the man just re-elected to a second term as President, whose presence hovers over this novel with malignity. Part of Artie’s depression comes from the popular success of a man whom Artie believes is destroying American democracy and life. Towards the end of the novel, Artie refers to America’s national suicide.  How in such a short novel can all this be achieved?

And yet there is so much more. Artie enjoys a growing and enriching relationship with his son, Rob, in both men’s maturity and, although becoming aware of a major issue within that relationship, it surprisingly draws them closer together. Artie even teaches his son how to withdraw from a relationship with a woman that is inappropriate and confused, helping Rob to see where true love lies in his life. Parenting is a major theme in the book.

But the world Artie lives in is falling apart. Teaching the American Civil War to his students, he had required them, for years, to enter the life of a Union soldier or nurse to explore each one through their letters and other writings.  He is instructed by his school principal, whom he likes and admires, that he must include Confederate soldiers in the mix for ‘balance’.  He is appalled.

Artie is required to apologise for throwing a student out of class for awful behaviour. It is a tense meeting in the principal’s office between parents and student, convened by the principal.  Artie does apologise but manages to retain his dignity and authority.  The principal himself commits suicide, a couple of years later, for reasons that are unstated but, the reader suspects, might depend to some degree on the awful political situation in which America finds itself.

But enough. I must not reveal too much of the story which would damage your enjoyment of this very involved and fine novel. Like the Irish writers mentioned, Elizabeth Strout packs an enormous amount onto a brief canvas. As with Claire Keegan, Strout’s writing is spare, while encompassing enormous themes. This book moved me, inspired me and delighted me. Artie Dam is one of the nicest men you will ever meet, though a vehicle for posing some of the major reflections on the human condition.

Dr Michael McKernan is a historian and author of twenty books on war and society and rural Australia.

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout is available from 5 May 2026 in all good bookshops.