Unquiet Waters: Review Of Booker-shortlisted ‘The Things We Never Say’

Milan Kundera wisely said that the novelist is neither historian nor prophet, but an explorer of existence. American writer Elizabeth Strout is an acutely perceptive explorer of existence—of particular people who exist in a particular time. In her Booker-shortlisted novel, The Things We Never Say (Penguin Random House), she trains her gaze on Artie Dam, a high-school teacher in his 50s. Dam is struggling to cope with Trump’s America and its daily cruelties. He teaches history and also imparts lessons on basic human decency and kinder ways of being to his students. It’s not easy for him to decode their behavior in the post-pandemic world, where everyone seems to be beset with anxiety and finds it hard to put their thoughts into words. 

Dam’s core tenets; compassion, tolerance, community values; are in short supply in a deeply polarised society. So, his alienation is a product of the political climate as well as his inability to communicate with Evie, his wife of many years. He has a great rapport with his students, but on the home front, conversations are stilted, silences weighed down by unsaid words. Dam loves his son Rob deeply, but father and son too have trouble talking to each other. The past—his parents’ ghosts, his sister’s pain, memories of a terrible accident that changed the course of his son’s adolescence—haunts Dam. The past may be a different country, but he is never free of it.

Strout paints a deeply felt picture of Dam’s world and the people who occupy it. His family, his friends and acquaintances, his students and colleagues are all part of the mix. Surrounded as he is by people and settled into his regular routine, Dam is a very lonely man. In the initial part of the narrative, thoughts about ending his life trouble him. He feels out of place in his domestic life. He feels lost in the grand house they live in, which Evie inherited from her parents in a coastal town in Massachusetts. The class divide between Dam (the son of working-class parents) and Evie also seems insurmountable. The gulf that separates them is wide, and they can’t seem to find the words to bridge it. Dam’s internal struggle is etched in minimalistic strokes. But every tiny detail, every ordinary encounter, every flash of memory is telling. Details, which Strout gathers like a fastidious beachcomber, draw the reader into the heart of individual lives, and also offer a nuanced understanding of the big picture.

Many of the scenes in the novel are bound to lodge themselves in the reader’s memory. The power of Strout’s style springs from its quiet intensity. Consider the fateful day on which Dam, who is known to love sailing, sets off in his little boat. Water, a recurring motive in the novel, mirrors Dam’s mental landscape. At the start, the sky is a “terrific blue”, pretty white clouds roll past, and the air feels sharp against his face. But danger lurks behind the day’s bright façade. Without warning, Dam loses his footing, finds himself trapped in the current and on the verge of drowning. The near-death experience—his mixture of belief and disbelief, the sharp physical sensations he registers, the shock and fear that ripple through him—feels so real, so immediate.

Or consider the moment Dam learns of a secret that shakes the very foundation of his existence. Everything he has so far believed to be true about his family is revealed to be a fiction. The secret changes everything; his knowledge of it colours every scene and interaction that follows. The revelation, and its devastating impact, are sketched with an assured touch. The drama is all the more impactful because it is understated. The blows feel all the more painful because they are free of sensationalism. Strout structures the chapters in short scenes, and each scene says exactly what it is meant to convey, nothing more, nothing less. Some sentences have the economy and intensity of Zen koans: “Artie—having almost died—no longer wanted to.” “He did not want to die, he just did not want to live.”

Though there is much sadness to bear, glimmers of hope are threaded through the narrative. Friends stay friends over the years; strangers become friends by accident; students remain grateful to Dam for his help in shaping their personalities and their career choices; and Rob, Dam’s loving son finds a way to connect with his father even if they run into choppy waters at times. There is laughter and camaraderie even in the age of hateful rhetoric.

Those in power try to sow the seeds of strife and division, but acts of everyday generosity and kindness continue to make a difference. Love survives many storms; sparks of kindness brighten the horizon even when clouds smother the sky. Strout shines the spotlight on ordinary lives, revealing the extraordinary undercurrents that lurk beneath them. Secrets and secrecy notwithstanding, she finds hope in the threads that bind people together. Her novel is a finely crafted pean to our flawed humanity. That makes the book necessary reading.