As usual, Strout manages to create scenes of intense intimacy in prose that feels as casual and comfortable as your favorite flannel shirt. She’s just so damn good ... Reading these pages, I was repeatedly awed by her restraint, her willingness to let sentimentality evaporate in the hard light of her prose ... Reflecting its airy plot, Strout has structured The Things We Never Say with appropriate looseness — almost as a collage, a series of short passages, sometimes a few pages, sometimes just three or four lines. The effect is impressionistic while providing the gentlest forward momentum.
She’s not a minimalist, but Elizabeth Strout does more with less than any writer I can think of ... Strout’s scene-setting is brilliantly terse and precise ... Complex and layered.
Glorious ... Full of tiny interactions that buoy her characters ... The people in Things — like people in real life — tend not to unburden themselves of their feelings; they clench them in. And, not surprisingly, that’s not healthy ... Strout never overreaches with her writing, which is built on the emotional progress her characters achieve when they genuinely connect ... Strout is not a sentimental writer. The folks in her books don’t automatically become happy because they open up to each other ... But Strout does offer her characters hope.
Strout's signature subjects of loneliness and class humiliation reappear ... There's a major secret revealed in the course of this story and Artie's special area of interest — American Civil War history — allows the novel to make some profound commentary about our own contemporary civil wars. But Strout readers know her most overwhelming epiphanies sneak up in throwaway moments, fragmented short paragraphs.
Strout’s capacious empathy and rigorous attention to the nuances of human behavior and psychology are as evident as ever ... That being said, this is by far her bleakest book, suffused with an unremitting darkness that envelops its protagonist and infects its reader ... It’s a bit on the nose, it’s hyperbolic, and it’s a symptom of what makes this one of Strout’s less successful works of fiction — not less successful because less acute, exactly, but because the fiction seems to lose its bearings on the way to becoming parable or allegory ... Too much in this novel is spelled out with painstaking obviousness ... The bleakness feels not only unrelenting but also programmatic ... As one of Elizabeth Strout’s most ardent critical champions, I feel no pleasure in asking: where are the mordant humor, the surprising takes and turns, the zest and bite and penetrating insight, the startling poignancy and precise, poetic turns of phrase ... Still, there are many meaningful messages and moments in the novel.
An exploration of loneliness and the pursuit of meaning in the American suburbs ... The Things We Never Say is not part of Ms. Strout’s novel cycles involving either Olive Kitteridge or Lucy Barton, but in style it is closely akin to those books: simplified, sincere and allergic to literary adornments ... Sometimes Ms. Strout is moved to break into the narrative with her own heartfelt proclamations on humankind ... There is also an emotionally charged political angle to the book, which starts before the 2024 presidential election and, in a cautionary epilogue, advances into our future. These interpolations of topicality are empathetic but somewhat grafted in. Ms. Strout has developed her true mastery in an archetypal mode, writing stories that resemble secular parables or everyman morality dramas
Rewards rereading, as the whole story is present, though disguised, from the beginning. Curious details and offbeat observations in the early chapters are pieces of a puzzle, their significance clear only after viewing the whole. Often it’s annoying when an author withholds information, but Strout’s style is so casual and airy and her storytelling so assured that her omissions feel deft and natural rather than manipulative. Being along for the ride is a pleasure ... Strout excels at creating a sense of things coming together. Within her novels, scenes and tangents and remembered incidents gradually coalesce into collective meaning like found objects being woven into a bird’s nest ... has the feeling of a fresh start, though many of Strout’s prevailing preoccupations remain: social class, suicide, disappointment between parents and children, secret loves, gentle husbands with tough-cookie wives, and our current political moment ... This last element is tricky in fiction.
In this story again a longstanding marriage is tested by secrets and withholdings that the reader becomes privy to, creating a healthy narrative tension that keeps the pages turning. It is not only the power of secrets that achieves this momentum. It is the simultaneity of other interiorities unfolding, the other arcs of change and shift that surround the main characters ... Vivid ... This is a profound, resplendent novel that stares our present moment in the face while throwing a lifeboat to cling to in the storm.
Uncharacteristically dispiriting ... Not that Strout’s fiction is typically buoyant, but hints of underlying tenderness do usually warm her stark narratives and soften her spartan prose. Any such glimmers in The Things We Never Say are faint against the encroaching darkness: the novel is sombre, even bleak ... World-weary.
To read Strout is to experience an intimate conversation with a gripping storyteller who helps you to see the world anew. This great strength, a very powerful authorial voice, does however, begin to suggest a diminishing return here ... If readers are unfamiliar with Strout, this is not the novel of hers to begin with. But for those already enamoured of her subtly profound prose, this should prove a welcome return from a familiar voice, one with a new story to tell.
The first great work of fiction about Trump’s presidency ... Strout understands national fracture not as abstract rhetoric, but as something lived intimately: in marriages, friendships, families and the painful silences between people ... This is a deeply existential novel, preoccupied with secrecy, loneliness and the limits of understanding. Strout is brilliant at uncovering what goes on beneath the surface of ordinary life ... Feels like Strout’s most sobering novel yet: slow-burning, elegiac and deceptively simple, despite its layering of motifs and ideas.
Strout has a signature ability to make me feel for her characters ... The power of the novel is in Strout’s ability to bore into small moments of character revelation and connection ... The result is a reading experience of both great warmth and great worry. I don’t know anyone else doing it quite like this today.
In The Things We Never Say Strout lays on the trauma especially thick ... This being an Elizabeth Strout novel, there are nonetheless moments of beauty ... Strout’s turns of phrase are gorgeous ... The best, most sustaining novels pose questions; they don’t answer them, at least not so definitively. For all the messiness The Things We Never Say purports to explore, its philosophical conclusion is too neat, too easy.
Readers will delight in the discovery of this new fictional world ... There is so much here to explore, so many endless human mysteries. Let’s hope that this fine author continues steadily along her path, delivering unto her loyal readers story upon story, gift upon gift.
Revered for her deeply empathetic and perceptive approach, Strout creates existentially complex interior worlds for seemingly simple characters ... Tantalizingly perceptive and compassionate glimpses into the backstories of the key contributors to Artie’s crisis of the soul will give readers hope that these indelible individuals will one day appear in a trademark Strout spin-off of their own.
Diverting ... Strout’s storytelling is thinning a bit, like middle-aged hair ... Vivid characters are set adrift in a 'ripped from the headlines' tableau that complicates the story, and the storytelling.
