What is a life well lived?

Ten different people could have ten different answers, and that’s all right. There is no universal barometer for success. What’s there is simply what we value and what we believe in.

There is one answer to this question that many people share, though: I don’t know.

In The Things We Never Say, high school teacher Arthur Dam doesn’t know. Over the course of the novel, he will ask himself that same question over and over again.

Arthur is fifty-seven. He lives in New England and has been married for at least 30 years. He holds a deep-seated insecurity that his wife, Evie, married beneath her. They have a son, Rob, who has been estranged following a violent tragedy. Arthur wishes that he was closer to Rob.

Arthur’s hobby is sailing, and he loves his teaching job. He teaches high school history, and his class focuses on the American Civil War. He makes his students study actual letters that people wrote during the war.

When the story begins, Arthur is saying goodbye to Flossie, one of his closest friends. Flossie’s husband Reginald has just passed away recently, and Flossie is moving elsewhere to live with family. Arthur does not have many close friends.

Arthur is unsatisfied with life. He wants to die with as little fuss as possible. He dislikes how people never truly open up to each other. He lives day to day while holding on to his own terrible secret fantasy of orchestrating his own quiet demise.

Elizabeth Strout writes about Arthur’s secret wish so matter-of-factly that it becomes disturbing in its calmness. While her narration reveals Arthur’s thoughts and frustrations, her cadence and choice of words reveal Arthur’s state of mind. It’s not something that could be described as pleasant, but it’s definitely engrossing.

A near-death experience sets off a chain of events that will take Arthur through a series of revelations—about his students, about his son, his marriage, and his life. While he never explicitly asks the question of how to live well, he encounters the idea over and over as he uncovers more about the people in his life.

This introspection, while a very strong part of the novel, might not actually be its best part: it’s his interactions with his students that are the most inspiring sections of the story. Arthur deals with all sorts of kids, from bullies, to loners, to the ones who have problems with authority. Arthur has his weaknesses, but he has a genuine love for his students: so much that it arguably detracts from his journey of self-discovery because he’s so good at being a teacher.

The author also makes a point of grounding the time period in contemporary times: it is a few years after the pandemic, and—while Trump is not named outright—it also takes place before, during, and right after the 2024 United States presidential election. These elements are underdeveloped and somewhat disconnected from the rest of the novel. There is a minor subplot about the increasingly fascist state that America is becoming, but save for one revelation about how someone with different politics could still be a friend, it doesn’t seem to say much about the central themes of the novel.

The Things We Never Say is a sharp character study. Arthur is an interesting protagonist, and there’s a satisfaction in being along for the ride as he pieces together the disparate elements of his life into something that he can understand and appreciate. In the end, Arthur is better equipped to ask himself once again: how should he be living his life?

We should all be so lucky.

While The Things We Never Say is hardly a thrill ride, it is engaging in its own way. Teachers will enjoy reading about how Arthur deals with his students, and anyone who has ever wondered why people are the way they are will find something to take away from this book. Readers who appreciate character-driven stories and the inner lives of ordinary people will find much to reflect on here.