Book of the Day

From the review

Artie Dam wants something that sounds modest and turns out to be enormous: to know what is actually going on inside the people he lives among. He teaches history to eleventh graders. He goes along to the parties his wife attends, makes the small talk, goes sailing when the weekend comes. By every outward measure he is fine. Inside, he keeps circling one question, and Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say, a piece of literary fiction that runs just 207 pages, is built around his failure to answer it. Strout lets that failure play out in small increments. The book arrives in many short moments rather than a plotted climb, which suits a man whose life is made of routine and whose inner weather changes in minutes. Her prose is bare-bones in the best sense: plain sentences that don't reach for effect and don't need to. Artie is the reason it works. He is decent, a little awkward with his own pleasures, and hungry for his grown son to visit more. I found him impossible to dislike and hard to watch, which is a difficult balance to strike with a character who mostly thinks and watches. His best moments are with his students, where a teacher's ordinary kindness turns out to carry more weight than he realizes, and where his students begin to see past their textbooks.