No one is ordinary: The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout, reviewed
It is both a comfort and a discomfort to yield to a new novel from Elizabeth Strout, who writes with such perspicacity that any time spent in her world unsettles as much as it consoles. So it proves with The Things We Never Say, her 11th book and the first since My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) to feature a new character. He is Artie Dam, a misunderstood 57-year-old history teacher from a Massachusetts coastal town. He is married, popular – ‘“Damn-dam, the greatest man,” his students would sometimes say to him’ – and likes nothing better than to take his sailing boat out in Massachusetts Bay. But it soon
