Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say follows a teacher’s private collapse through a tense political moment
Set in coastal Massachusetts, the Booker-listed novel tracks Artie Dam, a history teacher whose unease about his students, his marriage and his son’s past grows into a crisis of despair. The audiobook is read by Robert Petkoff, who brings out the character’s gentleness and mounting hopelessness.
A teacher at the edge of despair
Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say centres on Artie Dam, a beloved history teacher in coastal Massachusetts whose trademark white socks and old sneakers have made him a familiar presence to generations of students. In the audiobook edition, the story unfolds as Artie watches the people around him sink into uncertainty, from pupils who feel shut out of their own futures to a nation shaped by the prospect of a divisive political comeback.
Artie’s unease is not only civic but deeply personal. He sees in his students a widening sense of hopelessness: they are discouraged by the state of the world and unsure they will ever reach the lives they have imagined for themselves. That same mood shadows Artie’s own thinking, linking his private unhappiness to the larger atmosphere of dread that hangs over the novel.
At home, his marriage offers little relief. His wife, Evie, is a therapist from a wealthy family, and the relationship has hardened into mutual distance. Artie comes to understand that he does not really know her, and that she has no real interest in knowing him either. The novel traces that emotional distance back to the family’s trauma a decade earlier, when their son Rob survived a car accident that killed his girlfriend, Heather.
The loss continues to shape the household, and Artie’s isolation deepens to the point that he contemplates suicide, searching for a way to do so without drawing attention. The story does not linger on melodrama, but on the ordinary texture of sorrow: the accumulation of silences, half-known grief and the ways a life can narrow around what has never been spoken.
A turning point comes while Artie is sailing, when an incident on the boat interrupts his downward spiral and alters what he thinks is still possible. Later, a revelation from Rob changes his understanding of both his family and his place within it, shifting the novel away from resignation and toward a more complicated awareness of connection.
The book has been longlisted for this year’s Booker prize, and its power lies in the way it ties a modest, humane portrait of a schoolteacher to the climate of a fractured political era. Strout builds the novel around the idea that private anxiety and public life are never entirely separate, allowing Artie’s personal crisis to reflect a wider cultural exhaustion without reducing either to a slogan.
Robert Petkoff narrates the audiobook, shaping Artie as a figure of decency, quiet pain and deepening self-knowledge. His reading helps emphasise the novel’s central insight: that each person contains an inner life far larger and less legible than the version the outside world sees.