Elizabeth Strout's New Novel Is Already Being Called One of the Year's Best
Elizabeth Strout has spent most of her career working the same geographical and emotional territory — the coast of Maine, the quiet devastations of marriage and childhood, the specific heaviness of the things people do not say. Olive Kitteridge, My Name Is Lucy Barton, Oh William — each book deepened and extended an artistic project that has become one of the most sustained and coherent in contemporary American fiction.
The Things We Never Say, publishing May 5, departs from the Maineverse she has inhabited for decades. The novel follows Artie Dam, a 57-year-old history teacher on the Massachusetts coast — still New England, still a certain quality of emotional restraint and accumulated silence, but with a different protagonist and a different set of relationships to interrogate. The title is almost too legible as a Strout theme. She has always been a novelist of the inarticulate, of the emotional content that circulates in rooms between people who cannot find the language for it.
The New York Times has already named the novel to its list of best books of the year so far, which is a meaningful signal at this stage of the calendar. Strout does not produce failures. She may produce books that resonate differently with different readers — William received a more mixed response than Olive Kitteridge — but the craftsmanship is consistent and the ambition is always disciplined rather than showy.
The departure from her established setting is the most interesting fact about this novel before reading it. Whether it unlocks something new in her fiction or simply translates her established vision to a slightly different latitude is a question worth sitting with.