Our Take

There is a particular kind of Strout novel — and if you've read Olive Kitteridge or Oh William!, you know it immediately — in which an ordinary life is held up to the light and reveals, quietly and without drama, something devastating and true. The Things We Never Say belongs squarely in that tradition. Artie Dam is not a remarkable man, which is precisely the point. His isolation is the kind that goes undetected for decades because it wears the convincing costume of a functioning life. What Strout does better than almost anyone is refuse to explain her characters. She presents them with a completeness and a compassion that feels less like authorial control and more like genuine understanding. The secret that upends Artie's world is handled with the same restraint — its significance isn't announced, it accumulates. By the final pages, the weight of everything unsaid between people who love each other is almost unbearable. At 224 pages, this is Strout at her most distilled. Readers who responded to Olive Kitteridge, My Name Is Lucy Barton, or the quiet devastation of Ann Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread will find this essential. A small novel that contains, as Strout's work always does, a great deal of the world.