The Secret of Elizabeth Strout’s Appeal
· The Atlantic
How does she do it? Not just the neat trick of beguiling highbrow critics while at the same time pleasing millions of readers who don’t care about literary bona fides. The real feat is harpooning the reader artlessly (or so it seems), with language as plain as a Congregational church, a paucity of dramatic incident, and a cast of characters no more exotic than your neighbors. They aren’t exotic, her characters, but they’re quirky—some cantankerous, some bafflingly passive, all convincingly real. Thinking about them, I keep coming back to the bedrock of her work, what she has called “the singularity and mystery of each person.” She shows us how strange we are, and how similar (an insight verging on homily but thankfully sugar-free). She’s not a minimalist, but Elizabeth Strout does more with less than any writer I can think of.
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Her 11th novel, The Things We Never Say, is classic Strout (New England setting, unhappy marriages, family secrets, lots of what mental-health professionals call “suicidal ideation”); her legion of fans is bound to propel it to the top of the best-seller lists. And this time, there’s an urgent topical element: The story begins in the summer of 2024—not in Maine, where Strout grew up, her go-to fictional territory, but rather in an unnamed seaside town in Massachusetts—and Donald Trump (whose name is one of the things never said) is about to be elected president for the second time. Strout’s hero, Artie Dam, is a high-school history teacher, so it comes as no surprise when he eventually writes the word FASCISM on the blackboard.
Artie grew up poor, married rich, worked hard, and now is grateful for his settled, comfortable life (“He was, in many ways, the embodiment of the American dream”). Instinctively humble, he insists on egalitarian ethics, telling his class, “Do not ever feel that you are superior to someone else.” You want to like Artie—and when you find out that his placid, often-jovial exterior conceals a troubled inner life, you want to know him better (even though his closest friend admits to herself that he’s “almost dopey”).
He suffers from the most common ailment in Strout’s world—loneliness. The eponymous main character in Olive Kitteridge, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, knows “that loneliness can kill people.” She tells a man who doesn’t want to die alone: “We’re always alone. Born alone. Die alone. What difference does it make?” (The sentences enact isolation.) In My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), Lucy confesses, “Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted.”
Artie’s brand of loneliness is specified in the novel’s epigraph, from Carl Jung; it comes from “being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself.” His grown-up son has been a little distant lately, but his students call him “Damn-dam, the greatest man,” and his colleagues like and respect him. Still, Artie is lonely; the flow of thought and feeling finds no outlet. He goes to a cocktail party with his wife; on the way home, he wonders why “people never say anything real,” and as he hangs their coats in the closet, he feels “a dismalness return to him.”
On page 16 we learn his “secret” answer to his condition: “For more than two months, he had been thinking how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so.” Considerate even as he plots self-slaughter, Artie decides that drowning is the way to go. His sailboat is moored in the bay. A boating accident might be staged. But then a boating accident very nearly does kill him (he slips when stepping from dinghy to boat). The water in the cove is frigid—“so cold he felt as though he had been dropped into a test tube of acid.” As the current sweeps him away from shore, Artie understands that he won’t last long.
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Strout has set the scene with a comically banal metaphor: “The sky was once again a terrific blue; white clouds rolled past, puffy-looking like enormous cotton balls.” Now, unable to swim against the current, his boots full of icy water, his sodden sweater and coat weighing him down, Artie stares up at the sky. “Oh, it was beautiful! White clouds moved far above him, momentarily blocking the sun, and then the sun came out again.” Stripped of ornament, the goofy simile gone, the radically spare sequence of sun-clouds-sun matches the seesaw of emotion visited upon the reader—lovely day, mortal fear, sudden hope when rescue arrives. After the tension, release. “It was that quiet and that simple, but Artie—having almost died—no longer wanted to.”
Because we nearly lose him (less than a quarter of the way through the novel), Artie is now that friend we hug close and watch over nervously. Fear of spoilers prevents me from saying why, but Artie’s troubles (mostly centered on his wife, who thinks he’s “soft,” and his son, whose marital woes may or may not explain his hangdog look) have not blown away like cotton-ball clouds. Soon Artie feels as cut off as he did before the near-death drenching.
Which could be why, at age 57, he starts shoplifting, taking first a cheap plastic comb from a drugstore. Then comes a remarkable episode in a shop three towns away from where he lives.
[Read: An interview with Elizabeth Strout about her novel Abide With Me]
Strout’s scene-setting is brilliantly terse and precise: “A little bell tinkled as Artie stepped over the threshold of the men’s carpeted clothing store. There was almost a sense of stepping inside a small church, it was that quiet.” The peculiar placement of “carpeted” and the hesitant, almost-apologetic church metaphor do plenty of work, reflecting Artie’s confusion, echoing his voice, invoking traditional morality, and pretending with the colloquial phrasing that nothing literary is happening on the page.
Artie buys a shirt and then tries to steal two dress shirts (impossible, by the way, to imagine him actually wanting to wear them). “What am I doing?” he thinks, feeling “bizarrely far away.” Strout gives the tinkling bell she started with a sinister echo: “As he stepped through the shop’s front door, a loud buzzer went off, and Artie experienced both an immediate terror and bewilderment.” He’s been caught, a blaring indictment spoiling the holy hush.
A wrenching swerve here, I know, but I want to revisit the hilarious shoplifting scene near the beginning of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001). Chip Lambert steals a filet of line-caught Norwegian salmon from a Manhattan food emporium Franzen calls “the Nightmare” (though it’s obviously Dean & DeLuca). The scene is a flamboyant satire of turn-of-millennium yuppiedom:
A humidity had stolen over the sky, a sulfurous uneasy wind from Rahway and Bayonne. The supergentry of SoHo and Tribeca were streaming through the Nightmare’s brushed-steel portals. The men came in various shapes and sizes, but all the women were slim and thirty-six; many were both slim and pregnant.
Chip has no way of paying the $78.40 that the filet costs. When he tucks it under his sweater, it slips down into his pants: “The dangling filet felt like a cool, loaded diaper.” Later it spreads into his underpants “like a wide, warm slug.” The Nightmare is hellish (that sulfurous wind) and stealing from it hardly seems sinful; the thief’s only discomfort is physical, and Franzen plays it for laughs.
Shoplifting is a crime against capitalism, an insult to consumerism, the pursuit of happiness perverted. Ostentatious, almost boastful, Franzen amplifies the socioeconomic implications. Strout—subtle, almost furtive—mutes them. But both highlight the character’s desperation. Chip is beyond broke and generally in a bad way. A purloined salmon filet covering the groin “like a codpiece” is a low point for him (and reminds us of his priapic obsessions), but he gets away with it—zero remorse—and that’s somehow exactly right. Unashamed, unpunished, he’ll regale dinner guests with the story and get a laugh.
Strout, meanwhile, looks inward, deep into Artie, who’s mortified, profoundly shaken. Once the shock has worn off, he sees his behavior as an alarming symptom—has he had a stroke?
Diametrically opposed in temperament, Strout and Franzen do have something in common: They’ve both had books chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. Whereas Strout was a gracious and grateful beneficiary of the “Oprah effect,” Franzen famously made disobliging comments about some previous picks—“schmaltzy, one-dimensional,” he called them.
Is Strout one-dimensional? Though quiet (the clang of current events mostly muffled), her novels are complex and layered. She’s a keen dissector of American class structure. Whether she’s schmaltzy is trickier. More interested in virtue than vice, she likes to show what appears to be vice vanquished by the revelation of hidden virtue. Are you a schmaltzy writer if you shy away from depicting evil, if your baddies turn out to be merely misguided?
The Burgess Boys (2013) revolves around what seems to be an act of evil. In a small town in Maine coping with a substantial influx of Somali immigrants, Zach (the Burgess brothers’ teenage nephew) throws a frozen pig’s head through the door of a storefront mosque—during Ramadan.
As usual when a public issue is at stake, Strout makes it personal. She channels her character Abdikarim, a café owner homesick for Mogadishu, to show the pain and fear inflicted by this desecration, and she also gradually reveals what motivated Zach, who eventually sees the gravity of his “dumb joke.” His regret shades into genuine contrition. Moreover, Abdikarim manages to forgive Zach, whom he understands is no more than a frightened child.
Strout sympathizes with the Somali immigrants. Her protagonist, Bob Burgess, laments “the terrible, terrible stuff they’ve been through” (and also acknowledges the difficulties that communities face in integrating and assimilating people from a very foreign culture). She despises bigotry and racism—the whole gamut, from the townsfolk who know better but insist on calling the new arrivals “Somalians” to the neo-Nazi white supremacists who make a cameo and call them “parasites.” As anyone who’s read any of her work can testify, Strout champions tolerance. Her tender heart is clearly center-left.
But to call her tenderhearted would be wrong. Angry, blunt, brittle, occasionally cruel (and especially intolerant of “meek-and-mousy-looking people”), Olive Kitteridge, in many ways the quintessential Strout character, is nobody’s idea of a liberal snowflake. She’s no conservative, either. Her disdain for George W. Bush (whose name, like Trump’s, is never mentioned) affects her physically: “She couldn’t stand to look at the president’s face: His close-set eyes, the jut of his chin, the sight offended her viscerally.” Nor is she woke, or rather (to avoid anachronism), politically correct: “Here was a man who looked retarded,” she thinks. “You could see it in his stupid little eyes.”
The tender side of Strout is her hopefulness—and that may be toughening up. In The Burgess Boys, Olive Kitteridge, and other early books, Strout seemed confident that good would eventually prevail, or at least persist. She never did happy endings, but in general her characters coped or grew or showed remorse; they endured, and the reader cheered them on.
Loneliness isn’t Artie’s sole affliction. He’s deeply disturbed by the temper of the times. The upcoming presidential election makes him feel “as if a noose was tightening each day around his neck.” His wife calls him a “doomsayer.” And indeed, he thinks his country will “never be the same, not in his lifetime.” When he teaches the Civil War to 11th graders, he assigns each student a soldier or nurse from Massachusetts to research. The principal calls him in and tells him some parents have demanded that he also assign “the Confederate side.” Dismayed, the principal apologizes: “This forcing you to take on Confederate soldiers, I’m sorry. This is what anticipatory obedience is.” Artie complies, yet sticks to a core principle. “In all my years of teaching,” he says when asked in class whom he’ll vote for, “I have never made my political views available to my students.” The reader is in no doubt.
Olive Kitteridge, a recurring character who gets a nod in the new novel, allows Strout to explore how to be a good person when you’re not, in fact, a particularly good person. With Artie, she shows how a good person fares in the age of Trump, when dismalness is an ever more common complaint and her characters’ sins of omission snowball into big, consequential lies; the moral slippage is both personal and political, domestic and national.
Always eager to exploit tension among her characters, Strout sets up a contrast between the meals Artie shares with two friends. One is Kenneth Moynihan, the man who saved Artie when he nearly drowned; the other is Anne Merrill, a colleague who teaches English at the high school and has been “a little bit in love with him” for years. Making canny but sparing use of fiction’s superpower—interiority—Strout lets seemingly trivial interactions give rise to unexpected emotions.
[Read: Elizabeth Strout on Louise Glück’s poem “Nostos”]
With Ken, Artie opens up easily: “Boy, I talk a lot with you. I just yak away.” When he tells him a momentous secret he’s shared with no one else, Ken feels privileged to be his confidant. They talk about their children, their parents, “how deeply upset people were these days,” the mess in the Middle East. Tucked between parentheses is the exception: “(They did not talk about the upcoming election in their own country.)” It later emerges that Ken may be a supporter of the unnamed Trump, but Artie doesn’t let that trouble him. The easy connection between the two men—Ken reaches out, touches Artie’s hand, and even says, though self-consciously, “Thank you for sharing”—is just a little mawkish.
A painfully awkward lunch with Anne swings the pendulum the other way. Here, Artie is incapable of telling his old friend anything, and when she tries to confide in him, his reaction disappoints. Both are baffled by the disconnect. Later, he realizes that what he fails to tell her shields her, and him, from having to acknowledge a chain of betrayals. Because he doesn’t open up to her, the best they can do is shake their heads in tandem over the topic du jour: “The election, Jesus,” she says. He answers, “I know, Anne. I know.”
Strout questions the conventional wisdom of our combative times by suggesting that partisan agreement doesn’t always bring us together, and that the partisan divide doesn’t always divide. A refreshing perspective—but how wearying, how unsettling, to be unsure even of our friends’ loyalties. Artie’s emotional range shrinks as the book draws to a close. In the epilogue, he says repeatedly that he’s tired. He’s tired of the lies he’s lived with; tired of the ambient anger; tired of the daily shocks administered by the new president. “On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide.”
The Things We Never Say … and yet, in two unmistakably political paragraphs in the novel’s epilogue, Strout makes a point of saying. She compiles a record of Artie’s distress during the first year of the new administration (deportations, arrests of student protesters, “Alligator Alcatraz”—he’s serially appalled). I suppose it could be mistaken for an anti-Trump rant: She certainly lets us know where she stands. Yet she’s neither preaching to the converted nor attempting to convince the misguided. Artie’s distress could be common ground, or not.
Lucy Barton—another writer, a stand-in for Strout—learned when she was very young that books soothed her sense of isolation. Lucy found her calling thanks to a rush of fellow feeling: “I will write and people will not feel so alone!”
This article appears in the June 2026 print edition.