This was on my list from the moment it launched. Everyone was talking about it and the response was so strong. I brought it home. It sat there. I moved it once or twice, which is not reading but can feel like progress. It was not calling to me.

Then I picked it up and began.

In my head, perhaps because of its size, or the way it looked, or because I had misunderstood something completely and was now madly projecting, I thought it was somehow going to be like Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. It definitely isn’t.

Both are short novels by writers who understand the pressure a quiet sentence can carry. That is more or less where the resemblance ends. Keegan’s novel tightens as it moves, every detail bringing Bill Furlong closer to a decision. Strout’s spreads out. It wanders into other lives, doubles back through memory and jumps years ahead. Keegan gives us the terrible clarity of a moral choice. Strout gives us people who are not even sure which choices they have made.

I struggled at the beginning. Then I was gripped. Then, for reasons I cannot quite explain, I put it down again.

Susan in Secondhand said, “If it has gripped you once, it will pick up.”

She was right. I picked it up again and finished it in one sitting, which is both a tribute to Elizabeth Strout and further evidence that booksellers should be listened to.

I am still confused by this book. I do not mean that I could not follow it. The story itself is clear enough. I mean that I am not sure what I think it believes, and I am even less sure what it expects me to believe about Artie Dam.

Artie is a fifty-seven-year-old history teacher in coastal Massachusetts, beloved by his students and respected by his colleagues. He and his wife, Evie, live in a large house by the sea which came from her wealthy family, and Artie still feels misplaced in it. Their adult son, Rob, survived a teenage car accident in which his girlfriend died. The family survived too, technically, but it has been rearranged around the event ever since.

Artie is lonely. This is the plain fact at the centre of the novel. He has a wife, a son, friends, colleagues and generations of pupils who remember him with affection, yet he is profoundly alone because he cannot say what matters to him. Strout begins with a quotation from Carl Jung about loneliness coming from an inability to communicate the things that seem important to oneself. She then spends the novel showing us the thousand small ways a person can be surrounded, liked and even loved without being known.

This is familiar Strout territory. Born in Portland, Maine, she grew up in Maine and New Hampshire, studied English at Bates College and later law at Syracuse. She worked in legal services and taught while writing through years of rejection. Her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, appeared when she was in her early forties. Olive Kitteridge, about one magnificently difficult woman and the people around her, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

Since then, Strout has built one of the most convincing inhabited worlds in contemporary fiction. Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge and Bob Burgess move through separate books and into one another’s stories. By Tell Me Everything in 2024, reading Strout felt like returning to a town where you know who has married badly, whose child never visits and who cannot be trusted at a funeral.

The Things We Never Say leaves that established world behind and gives us a new cast in Massachusetts, although Strout’s great subject remains the same: the distance between the life visible from outside and the one being endured within.

Her prose can appear almost artless. People repeat themselves, misunderstand a look, remember an old humiliation, notice someone’s shoes. Strout puts one small fact beside another and lets the pressure build. Her characters are rarely eloquent about pain because most people are not. They say they are tired. They talk about dinner.

The looseness is deliberate, but it partly explains why I kept slipping away. Short sections, changes in perspective and sudden movements into the future create accumulation rather than forward pull. Strout may tell us what happens to a character years later, even how they die. In a novel preoccupied with free will, this matters. The future arrives as settled while Artie is still wondering whether anyone chooses anything at all.

It is clever, unsettling and occasionally frustrating. The question is no longer simply what will happen. Strout often tells us. It is whether these people will understand what has happened, and whether understanding would alter anything.

The critical response has divided at almost exactly this point. Maggie Shipstead in the New York Times argued that the apparent tangents disclose their design on rereading. Publishers Weekly also noticed that some episodes feel random, but thought Strout’s central themes held. Kirkus was less persuaded, suggesting that vivid characters had been set adrift in topical events. These are arguments about whether accumulation is the form, or evidence that the form is losing control. I moved between all three positions.

Artie is presented as a good man. Strout is far too intelligent to place a halo directly over his head, but the light around him is soft. His pupils love him. He teaches through primary sources rather than a polished national story. He worries about frightened teenagers, loves his son with helpless tenderness and feels the suffering of the world keenly.

And yet I kept resisting the invitation to approve of him.

Artie and his friends think of themselves as liberal, worldly and kind. They are appalled by the coarsening of American politics and the return of an unnamed president. They recognise intolerance elsewhere very quickly, but their own outlook can also seem narrow. They have built another small town inside this one, with the correct newspapers, the correct anxieties and a more sophisticated vocabulary.

Their parochialism has good manners.

This is most obvious in Artie’s friendship with Ken Moynihan, the man who saves his life and becomes his confidant. Artie can speak to Ken in a way he cannot speak to his wife or to Anne, his old friend and colleague. The men talk about family, grief, the Middle East and how unsettled everyone feels. They do not talk about the election. When Artie realises that Ken may support the political figure he fears, he decides that it does not really matter. Except that it does.

The friendship appears to be evidence of Artie’s generosity. He sees the human being beyond the vote. This is attractive, perhaps necessary. If every relationship must first pass an ideological inspection, we will all end up very pure and very lonely.

Still, I found myself asking the more impolite question: what if Artie is wrong?

What if refusing to discuss Ken’s politics is avoidance? Artie is a history teacher. He knows political ideas do not remain politely inside the polling booth. They become laws, school policies, deportations, permissions and prohibitions. He sees this when parents object to how he teaches the American Civil War and the school concedes before it is even forced to. A vote does not become harmless because nobody mentions it over lunch.

Nor does Artie extend unlimited tolerance. He and his friends judge people for being incurious, badly informed, too rich, too certain, insufficiently alarmed or alarmed about the wrong things. Some judgements are entirely fair. The interesting point is that they see themselves as people who do not judge.

Perhaps that is Strout’s intention. Artie’s acceptance of Ken contains its own small qualification: it does not matter, except that it does. He needs Ken badly enough to accept a zone of silence around the friendship. Seen that way, his tolerance is neither noble nor contemptible. It is need or serving the self.

This is where Strout is at her best. She understands that affection does not make us morally consistent. We may forgive in one person what we condemn in another because one of them knows how to listen to us. We call this nuance when we want to feel wise, hypocrisy when we are angry and love when we are frightened of losing them.

The novel itself sometimes seems less uncertain than its characters. Towards the end, Artie’s political alarm is no longer atmosphere; events are named and conclusions sharpen. I broadly share his horror, my resistance is to the change in literary temperature. Strout trusts us with silence, grief, class resentment and parental love. Politically, she seems less willing to leave us alone with the evidence.

Critical reaction has been especially divided here. Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times called this the first great work of fiction about Trump’s presidency; the Boston Globe saw the novel losing its bearings as it moved towards parable, while the New Statesman found its conclusions too neat. Adam Begley in The Atlantic came closest to my unease: Ken complicates the assumption that political agreement creates intimacy and disagreement destroys it, but the epilogue eventually says outright what the novel has left vibrating. I can see why one reader calls that courage and another calls it overstatement. The politics are most convincing when they behave like climate, altering the pressure inside rooms; they are less convincing when they step forward to explain the weather. It is so interesting to see as accomplished a writer as Strout not ‘leave it alone’ and I can’t work out the ‘why’.

That imbalance made me wonder whether the novel is testing Artie’s liberal worldview or finally endorsing it. It may be doing both.

I also kept thinking about the word “kind”. Artie notices distress, dislikes cruelty and wants his students to feel safe. But kindness without honesty can keep everyone comfortable while nothing is confronted. Evie withholds. Artie withholds. Parents and children protect one another with secrets that alter their lives. Everyone is trying to spare someone else. Much of the damage comes from the sparing.

The title suggests dramatic confessions, but Strout is interested in quieter failures of speech: the question not asked, the political subject stepped around, the truth delayed until it can no longer do any clean good. Silence in this novel can be loving, cowardly, tactful, coercive and self-protective, often at the same time.

I am not sure I loved The Things We Never Say. I was moved by Artie’s love for Rob, by the privacy of grief and by Strout’s ability to make a life flare through a few casual details. I was irritated by moments that felt too emphatic and unconvinced by the warmth surrounding Artie. I wanted the novel to look harder at people certain that kindness belongs naturally to their side.

Perhaps a book does not have to resolve its contradictions if the contradictions are the point. Perhaps Artie’s goodness is meant to remain provisional, compromised by fear, need, class, vanity and love, as most goodness is. Or perhaps I am giving the novel credit for questions it does not fully ask. I genuinely do not know.

What I do know is that Susan was right. Once the book had gripped me, it did pick up again. It has not entirely put me down since.

It is difficult to say much more about the actual events or characters without making the book sound either slight or over-explaining something Strout has deliberately left unsettled. It is short and tight, yet somehow ephemeral without being wispy. It has weight, but it will not hold still long enough to be pinned down.

There is a scene in which fog descends and Artie and Rob can barely see where they are going. That feels less like incidental weather than the atmosphere of the whole novel. This is a damp book. It never quite dries out. People move through mist, rain, memory and all the things they have failed to say plainly. Even when Strout jumps forward and tells us what will become of someone, it does not necessarily make that person clearer. Information is not the same as understanding.

Perhaps that is why I cannot summarise the novel neatly, or arrive at a firm conclusion about what it believes. Every time I think I have it, it seems to slip out of the category I have prepared for it. Political novel, marriage novel, late-life reckoning, study of friendship, portrait of a decent man: it is all of those things, but it resists being contained by any of them. There is something strong in that resistance, a rejection of easy compartmentalisation and, perhaps, of naming itself. Once we name Artie as kind, Ken as difficult, their wives as right or wrong, the liberals as enlightened and the conservatives as beyond reason, we can stop looking. Strout does not let us stop looking.

Do I recommend it? Yes, absolutely. Quite fiercely do I recommend it. I want other people to tell me whether I am being unfair to Artie. Do they see generosity in his silence, or evasion? Is his friendship with Ken proof of his tolerance, or does it expose how little that tolerance demands of him? Are we supposed to admire his willingness to live alongside political difference, or notice that refusing to argue can also mean refusing to risk anything? Has Strout written a humane answer to political division, or exposed the limits of liberal kindness without quite meaning to?

I genuinely do not know. I am not even certain that the novel knows, and I mean that as praise more than criticism.

That, surely, is one of the best reasons to read a book: not because it confirms what you think, but because, days later, you are still trying to work out what you think at all.