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Review: The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
The Booker shortlisted novel explores the conditions in which people misread each other and allow public appearances to stand in for understanding
Prefer HTon Google
Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say begins with Artie Dam, a 57-year-old history teacher who lives in coastal Massachusetts. He has been married to Evie for nearly three decades, has a grown son, Rob, and is well liked by his friends and colleagues. He goes sailing on his own, teaches his students about the violence and upheavals of the past, and tries to make sense of a present that seems increasingly difficult to understand. From the outside, his life appears settled.
But Artie has begun to feel a distance between himself and the people around him, and he finds himself wondering why it is so difficult for people to say what they really think and feel. His questions are personal, though they are also shaped by the political climate of the months leading up to the 2024 US presidential election. As the world around him grows unsettled, Artie begins to look more closely at his marriage, his relationship with his son and the things he has never quite been able to say aloud.
The question that troubles him becomes explicit after a party at the home of friends. Artie has been talking about free will with the high school principal, Hoover Lakeland, while the conversation moves between the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the upcoming presidential election and the divisions within the country. When Artie raises his question, Hoover looks away and turns to another guest. On the drive home, Artie tells Evie that he wonders “why people never say anything real.”
He is troubled by the ease with which people avoid subjects that might expose their fears, complicate their relationships or even disturb the pleasant surface of a gathering. Everyone seems to know something about everyone else. And yet this knowledge does not ever translate into honest conversation.
Strout’s novel seems particularly interesting when read alongside the social psychological concept of pluralistic ignorance. In a 2023 article in Frontiers in Social Psychology, Dale T Miller describes the phenomenon as a situation in which members of a group misjudge the private attitudes, feelings or behaviours of others. People may privately disagree with a norm but believe that everyone else accepts it. They then keep quiet, often to avoid embarrassment or social punishment, and their silence reinforces the impression that the norm is widely shared.
The result is a group that may be confidently mistaken about itself. What looks like consensus can be a collection of doubts that nobody feels able to express. Strout’s novel explores the conditions in which people misread one another and allow public appearances to stand in for understanding.
Artie’s experience at the party is a small example of the problem. He raises a serious question, but Hoover’s response gives him no indication of what the other man actually thinks.
Evie sees the situation differently. She tells Artie that nobody at a cocktail party is going to discuss an abortion or an affair. Some subjects according to her are private, and other people may not want their personal troubles made public. But Artie is also asking why people avoid difficult questions even when those questions concern matters that affect their shared lives. His frustration comes from the suspicion that social conventions have become a way of avoiding not only indiscretion but also genuine contact.
Miller’s account helps explain how such a situation can become self-reinforcing. In face-to-face interactions, people often interpret others’ composed public behaviour as evidence of their private attitudes. In reality, people may be anxious, uncertain to what is happening around them. Because nobody expresses these feelings, each person has little reason to suspect that others might be experiencing the same thing.
Strout makes this feeling a central feature of Artie’s world. At school, he notices that his students have changed since the pandemic. They are also anxious and less inclined to argue with him or one another. It has become difficult to get them to talk. On the first day of the school year, he asks them to write freely about themselves, explaining that he wants to know them and see how they put sentences together. Their willingness to write surprises him, and some of their accounts move him deeply. Yet two students begin with the words “I’m scared” without being able to explain precisely what frightens them.
Artie’s own classroom has a more direct encounter with the consequences of judgement. When he sees Danny Marino imitate the way another student, Rhonda Lazarre, walks, he becomes furious. He addresses the class without naming Danny, insisting that no student should consider himself superior to another. “No one is superior to anyone else in this world,” he tells them. Rhonda does not realise that she has been mocked, and Artie is relieved that she has been spared the knowledge.
This is exactly where Strout’s interest in ordinary kindness intersects with the psychology of social norms. Groups do not sustain their habits through explicit agreement alone. They also do so through what members permit, laugh at etc. But Artie’s response cannot be a grand solution to the larger political problems that trouble him. But it does make one wonder if the social atmosphere is fixed or not.
The novel’s political concerns give these small encounters a wider significance. Artie teaches history and he is troubled by the possibility that people do not learn from the past, even as the present appears to be moving towards familiar forms of hostility. The school’s approach to the Civil War is of this anxiety. Pressure to teach the conflict through the perspective of Confederate soldiers brings out a struggle over how history should be remembered and what kinds of political narratives institutions are willing to endorse.
Pluralistic ignorance can help explain why public norms sometimes persist after private beliefs have begun to change. If people believe that others support a position, they may hesitate to challenge it, even when they have reservations of their own. In larger social settings, media and highly visible voices can distort the impression of what a group believes. A vocal minority may appear representative, while quieter opposition remains difficult to see. The absence of visible resistance can then be mistaken for public approval.
This does not mean that every political silence conceals dissent. Miller’s account makes room for different forms and causes of pluralistic ignorance, rather than offering a single explanation for all of them. Fear of social consequences, uncertainty, embarrassment and the belief that speaking up will make no difference can all keep people quiet.
Artie himself is not entirely transparent. He he also keeps things to himself. He stores notes from former students in a jewellery box that belonged to his mother, and he does not tell anyone about them except Evie. The notes matter to him because they offer evidence that his work has meant something to others. His privacy is not necessarily a failure of communication. It is also a way of holding close something that feels precious.
The same ambiguity runs through his marriage. Artie and Evie have lived together for decades, sharing a house, friends and the aftermath of a family tragedy. Their son Rob’s car accident, which killed his girlfriend, altered the entire family. Evie began training as a family therapist, while Artie felt that his wife had become more officious and less warm. They gradually rebuilt their lives, but the distance between them did not disappear. Artie now worries that his son is withdrawing from him, and he cannot determine exactly when or why it began.
The family’s history shows how little proximity guarantees knowledge. Artie and Evie have experienced the same tragedy, but they have not experienced it in the same way. They have remained together, yet each has developed a separate understanding of what happened and what followed. Artie’s concern about Rob is intensified by his inability to enter his son’s private world.
A similar uncertainty shapes Artie’s relationship with Evie. When he tries to talk about free will, she is impatient with the question. She asks what has brought it on, but she does not seem to share his need to pursue it. Their exchange reveals a difference in temperament as much as a failure of communication. Artie wants to examine the questions that unsettle him; Evie appears more inclined to return to the practical business of living.
Their disagreement also complicates the idea that greater openness will necessarily bring people closer. The subjects that Artie considers urgent may feel abstract or unproductive to his wife, who spends her working life dealing with other people’s difficulties.
The novel’s epigraph, from Carl Jung, frames this problem as that of loneliness can arise not from a lack of people but from an inability to communicate what matters to oneself. Artie often feels that something essential is missing from his interactions. He can participate in ordinary social life without feeling that anyone has met him where he is.
Strout seems interested in the private nature of existence, in the fact that another person remains partly unknowable even after years of intimacy.
Strout’s novel, however, also asks what happens when silence belongs to an individual rather than a group. Artie’s private life cannot be fully explained by the behaviour of those around him. His loneliness, his questions about free will and his anxiety about the future are bound up with his own history and temperament.
What makes the novel moving is its attention to these partial, imperfect encounters.
Artie’s question about why people do not say anything real is a question about the conditions under which honesty becomes possible. What makes someone feel safe enough to speak? What allows another person to listen without immediately judging? How can a group recognise that its apparent agreement may conceal private doubt? And how much can one person reasonably expect another to understand?
Strout’s method is to follow ordinary people through the conversations they have and the ones they avoid. She is not interested in turning her characters into examples of psychological concepts. The political atmosphere surrounding Artie gives these questions urgency, but the novel remains grounded in the scale of everyday life.
Pluralistic ignorance helps explain how people can become mistaken about one another on a collective scale. Strout brings the question down to the level of individual lives,
The novel insists that other people’s inner lives cannot be inferred from their silence alone. The willingness to look again matters, also matters is to question the assumptions that make others seem predictable.
Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.
