The epigraph to Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel is taken from Jung: ‘Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.’ This might serve for any of Strout’s books, which repeatedly touch on loneliness and its causes. ‘Lucy, you’re a lonely little thing,’ Olive Kitteridge says in Tell Me Everything (2024), to which Lucy Barton replies: ‘Who is not lonely, Olive? Show me one person.’ Olive suffers too – ‘Loneliness! Oh, the loneliness!’ – and believes that ‘loneliness can kill people.’
As Jung says, the condition doesn’t stem from isolation. Strout’s characters live in sociable communities, mostly small coastal towns, where everyone knows everyone else’s business. They gossip, reminisce, pontificate, form unlikely friendships, fall out with or in love with one another. Yet they feel alone, disregarded and misunderstood. They don’t understand others, either, even those closest to them. ‘People always tell you who they are if you just listen,’ Lucy says to Bob Burgess in Tell Me Everything. But a couple of pages later she concedes that ‘we don’t ever really know another person … people just live their lives with no real knowledge of anybody.’
On the face of it, Artie Dam in The Things We Never Say isn’t lonely. At 57 he’s contentedly married, owns a house in Massachusetts overlooking the sea, goes sailing at weekends and is close to his son, Rob. He teaches history at the local high school, so successfully that he was recently named Teacher of the Year. The kids in his classes affectionately call him Damn-Dam; every year he gets notes from former students thanking him for changing their lives. But ‘an accretion of loneliness’ has brought him to the point of suicide, a need to slip ‘the ties of the world’. The world itself is dismaying: he dreads the outcome of the upcoming 2024 presidential election. Relations with friends and neighbours depress him too: ‘I wonder why people never say anything real,’ he complains. He’s living a double life, pretending to be fine while contemplating ways to die, whether by gun, razor, rope, pill, car crash or (his preferred choice) by falling out of his sailing boat and drowning. He remembers reading the line ‘People die of loneliness’ in ‘some book’ about ‘a crotchety old woman from Maine’.
He gets his chance one Saturday while hoisting himself from his dinghy into his sailing boat. The current is unexpectedly strong, his foot slips and suddenly he’s in the water. He had dreamed about this happening just a week before, blue sky and white clouds above him as he floated helplessly out to sea. Now that it’s happening he’s desperate to survive. And thanks to a motorboat coming along, he’s pulled from the water and taken to hospital. ‘Artie – having almost died – no longer wanted to.’ Or as he puts it to himself: ‘I did not want to die, I just did not want to live.’
Fifty pages in, the novel seems set on a familiar course: the progress of a man who finds meaning and purpose after nearly losing his life. But Strout resists the feel-good parable. Artie Dam, she reveals long before the end, will not live many more years. And there’s plenty of bad stuff to cope with in the meantime, not least a painful truth about his wife, Evie, and Rob. Artie isn’t reprieved and born again. He doesn’t become ‘good’ either, even if Evie, glimpsed in widowhood, thinks of him as ‘an absolute saint’. Instead, he’s forced into ‘finally becoming a grown-up’, which means recognising how little he has understood about marriage, fatherhood and himself. In this respect he’s like Jack Kennison in Olive, Again (2019): ‘What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing.’
The man who rescues Artie from the water, Ken Moynihan, visits him in hospital and they become friends, meeting for dinner regularly in a local restaurant. Ken is affable and easy to chat to, and Artie tells him things he doesn’t share with anyone else, including the truth about Rob’s paternity. Their conversations range widely but aside from some discussion of ‘the terrible stuff in the Middle East and Ukraine’ they don’t touch on politics – which is just as well, since Ken, Artie learns from Evie, is a Republican. It doesn’t stop him thinking of Ken as a ‘good and decent man’, but he finds it hard to understand how anyone can support Trump. Artie might have escaped drowning but ‘his country was committing suicide.’
Strout’s novels are so concerned with family – parental dysfunction, marital ups and downs – that critics often ignore their wider purview. Lucy by the Sea (2022) was set during the Covid pandemic and there’s an allusion to it here: Artie’s pupils are more anxious and fearful than their predecessors. Gaza, Elon Musk, the White House hounding of Volodymyr Zelensky, the mistreatment of illegal immigrants and the problems facing teachers now that kids get ChatGPT to do their homework all feature. These are all part of the reason for Artie’s persistent gloom, along with the election result, which is given a page to itself at the mid-point of the novel – just two sentences, big white space above and below: ‘The election came and went. Half of the country was stunned, the other half jubilant.’ Artie wouldn’t put it so neutrally. He has felt the growing anger in the world, and in himself. He can’t bring himself to say the word ‘Trump’ (or Strout can’t). To give the ‘idiot’ and ‘evil genius’ a name is intolerable.
Though the novel is largely constructed from Artie’s point of view, it occasionally hands over to others, if only to show us what they think of Artie, who ‘didn’t think much about himself at all’. To Evie, he’s considerate but irritating; to his friend Flossie, lovely but dopey; to Rob, an enigma; and to his teaching colleague Anne, wonderfully gifted. The general view is that he’s ‘soft’, too gentle for his own good. But that’s to underestimate the ferocity with which he stands up for softness. When he spots Danny Marino cruelly imitating a vulnerable fellow pupil, Rhonda Lazarre, he loses his temper: ‘I just now saw that one of you thought you were better than someone else in this class … Do not ever feel that you are superior to someone else. Because you are not … No one is superior to anyone else in this world.’ Both pupils end up in thrall to Artie.
Strout is so alert to her own material (as with that in-joke about Artie reading Olive Kitteridge) that it’s a shock to find her repeating herself. But the story of a kindly teacher’s reproach to a mocking student has appeared before, in My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), when Lucy is teased by a girl in her class and the young social sciences teacher, Mr Haley, goes red in the face with rage: ‘Do not ever think you are better than someone else. I will not tolerate that in my classroom.’ (Even the italicising of ever is the same in both passages.) Lucy falls ‘silently, absolutely, immediately in love with this man’ (as Rhonda does with Artie) and inherits his philosophy: ‘It’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.’ Lucy learns a similar lesson from her fiction tutor, Sarah Payne, about the virtue of not passing judgment, whether in novels or in life. This insistence on benignity and mutual respect is what makes Strout’s fictional world attractive, if sometimes sentimental. It presents every life – not least an ‘unrecorded’ and impoverished one – as equally valuable.
Judgment is hard to avoid, though. During a conversation about the way many young women now wear clothes that expose their midriff, no matter how big that midriff might be, Artie thinks how glad he is that ‘fat bashing’ is no longer allowed, at least in public. Strout doesn’t fat-bash but her attention to body size is obsessive. Her older men have large stomachs and so do some of the women: Denise in Olive Kitteridge ‘had a belly as though a basketball had been cut in half and she’d swallowed it’. Olive herself, in Tell Me Everything, is twice that size: she ‘glanced down at her belly, which stuck out like a basketball’. Part of the job of a novelist is to notice things, including physical attributes, though it’s a job better done less fixedly and without repetition of the same simile.
After breaking up with his long-time partner, Francesca, a concert pianist, Rob brings his new girlfriend, Rachel, to meet Artie and Evie. She’s a ‘skinny’, ‘dopey child’, nervous in the company of Rob’s parents, which perhaps explains why she keeps saying ‘like’ and ‘cool’. She also steals stuff, making off with an ‘old pillbox’ each time she visits. Artie and Evie are shocked: they don’t want their son going out with a ‘kleptomaniac’. Then again, Artie is himself guilty of shoplifting: first he steals a comb from a pharmacy, then he’s caught swiping shirts from a clothes shop. After checking that Artie has no criminal record, the shop’s owner, is understanding (‘In my time I’ve seen this kind of thing, and it often comes after a loss of some sort’) and lets him off. It’s a lesson about vulnerability – with his ‘swimmy’ head, Artie is ‘not fully there’ any more – and about forgiveness. Rachel fares less well: after she steals a poetry book from one of Rob’s friends, she’s given the push and Rob gets back together with Francesca.
Olive Kitteridge is larcenous too, as well as outspoken and sometimes obnoxious. A high point in the eponymous novel from 2008 comes when she steals a bra and shoe from the bedroom of her son’s loathsome new bride and smears black marker over a beige sweater. But Olive is also capable of kindness. The kids who found her terrifying in maths lessons (she’s no Artie) revise their opinion when she’s retired and widowed. You can do wrong and still be a good person. ‘Everyone is broken in some way’ is a recurrent motif: Olive, Lucy, Jack, Bob Burgess and now Artie are all damaged by what they go through.
With Lucy the damage results from a poverty-stricken, abusive childhood in rural Illinois. She grew up in an unheated garage and remembers being locked in a truck; she has, her mother-in-law says, ‘come from nothing’. Nobody comes from nothing in Strout; whatever it was defines you. Artie’s childhood in Boston was happy but downtrodden: his mother was poor and Irish, his father was the son of a German immigrant and worked as the superintendent for three blocks of flats. The family had a small basement apartment in one of the buildings. Artie marries up and moves on, as Lucy does, and makes a middle-class career for himself. He is, he thinks, ‘in many ways the embodiment of the American dream’. But he’s anguished at having lost touch with his father after his marriage. Artie recalls him phoning to say he was ‘feeling kind of depressed’ and the way he fobbed him off: ‘Come on, Dad. We all have days when we’re feeling down.’ Now that he too has ‘sad days’, he’s full of guilt and remorse: ‘Jesus, Dad … I wish I had known you.’
The guilt would be worse if he felt fully responsible for his actions (or inaction). But he has begun to doubt the notion of free will. Dispensing with small talk, he keeps asking people if they believe in it. While shoplifting he had felt almost without agency: ‘He had not had any sense of controlling himself.’ The country is out of control too: look who it has elected. He seeks comfort from determinism: ‘Something was going to happen to him and he would not be able to prevent it.’ But acceptance that he’s ‘going to my fate’ doesn’t improve Artie’s mental state. Trapped ‘behind a thick pane of Plexiglas’ by antidepressants, he lies to Evie, can no longer confide in his friends and has a breakdown in class. His ‘occupation is gone’, he says, quoting Othello.
To come to the view that every man is an island – ‘it was a private thing to be alive’ – is a bleak conclusion. Strout quashes any suspicion that this is just Artie’s perspective by chipping in as the omniscient author: ‘So blind we humans are – so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone … But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own.’ The short sections of Strout’s fiction are versatile in accommodating different stories and points of view. Here she accommodates herself, the author as sage. No longer self-effacing, she affects to be all-seeing. And what she sees is how little empathy and self-knowledge humans have.
The bleakness is offset by acts of generosity and strokes of luck. Artie has the gift of precognition, and when he dreams of Rob and Francesca leaving the country for good (and for their own good) it duly happens. His favourite pupils look set for bright futures too. Whatever the misfortunes of Strout’s characters, there’s a counterweight of optimism, even schmaltziness. Artie recalls finding his sister Maria with a box of icing sugar in her hand: ‘The poor girl had just desperately wanted sweetness in her life.’ A sweet-sour binary dominates Strout’s fiction. Ordinary lives are tragic (Maria dies young), but there’s triumph and elation too.
In Tell Me Everything, Olive and Lucy swap stories with a zeal that, on Lucy’s side, is difficult to believe. As its title suggests, The Things We Never Say offers a riposte. People are too secretive to tell everything; even when they want to confide, they can’t find the words. When Artie is awarded Teacher of the Year, he struggles to speak at the award ceremony. And the important thing he needs to address with Evie goes unspoken. What makes him ordinary and likeable is that he thinks so little of himself and says even less.