Random House
Review by Walter Cummins
The title captures the central concern of Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, which addresses with depth and complexity what a community of individuals is willing to reveal and to whom, including personal realizations they might or might not admit to themselves. A further uncertainty is what such openness would accomplish. The novel is not based on a single story but rather an ongoing series of encounters seen from the perspective of Artie Dam. He and those around him face issues of their own pasts and presents, all around the question of what was or wasn’t said or what should have or have not been said.
The Artie Dam known to those around him is a sixtyish high school history teacher with a specialty in the Civil War. While not with weapons, almost all in the novel are in a interior war with themselves and with those close to them—spouses, children, associates. Artie observes what’s going on with these people and within himself, perplexed by what he should say and do. Strout gets at the heart of this problem in an authorial aside: “All of us live with a huge blind spot before our eyes, meaning that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand how we appear to others. This was true for Artie Dam.”
Significantly, he tells the novel’s most profound secret, one he cannot bring himself to discuss with his wife, Evie, to a relative stranger he meets occasionally in a local tavern, perhaps because that man saved Artie’s life when he fell out of his dinghy and came close to drowning. Of course, it’s not unusual for people to confess to an outsider whose presence is less threatening. These are things we cannot bring ourselves to say to those who matter in our lives but demand to be revealed to someone.
The novel’s epigraph from Carl Jung makes this point: “Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
Most of those in Artie’s circle are lonely in this way, although several find an outlet with a trustworthy associate because they cannot bring themselves to speak openly to those who matter most essentially to them.
Artie does possess a different authority with his students, whom he cares for deeply, enough to earn him a teacher of the year award with a public honor that embarrasses him. Yet he seeks to have students discover who they are and what they want to become. Several feel they owe their lives to him. His real difficulty is finding a way to instill that illumination in those closest to him and especially to himself.
Strout in capsule flashforwards tells what will happen to several of the people, including Artie, and the impact those futures will have on others. In some ways, what becomes of them is one test of the possibilities of telling.
Artie spontaneously asks several people if they believe in free will, a way of seeking to know if he possesses any control over who he is and what he is capable of saying and doing. Is he powerless to speak what he cannot to those he loves?
Artie does achieve—with his students, certain colleagues and friends, and most importantly with his son. That’s the result of finally saying many of the things he has, throughout much of his life, never been able to share. What would have been the result if he was able to say more?
Yet, it turns out that saying to others is not enough. Although a meaningful connection with some others matters, expressing words that might change their lives, in the end Artie is a mystery to himself, a crisis never understood by those who think they know him well. He becomes aware of that fundamental truth: “All the things in the world that people do not know about one another. Even those very close to them.” Ultimately, every single person “held within themselves a vast, unknowable universe.”
The tensions and uncertainties is this novel are emotionally meaningful because of Elizabeth Strout’s ability to capture the troubled humanity of Artie and the others around him. Would the act of hearing truths make them the beings they should be? Their quest to overcome loneliness matters, but being alive was “a very private thing.” Throughout Artie has been haunted by his sister’s last words, “What are we going to do now?”
