Elizabeth Strout Tries the Patience of Everyday Saints

I ranked and reviewed each of the shortlisted novels. I also paired each novel with a classic. The winner of the 2026 Booker Prize was announced November 9, 2026 at 9:45 PM GMT. You can watch the recording of the ceremony at The Booker Prizes YouTube Channel.

This is a substantial revision of a review that I published on August 23 under the title “Okay, Boomer, but should ‘Genocide’ be one of ‘The Things We Never Say’?: Addressing Gen Z complaints about Elizabeth Strout’s Booker Prize contender.” That essay’s title projected unintended generational antipathy. Its too-clever-by-half allusion to horrific human tragedy was in poor taste. And the essay itself was structured like a game of Jenga playing a game of Twister. The Booker Countdown gives me a welcome mulligan on that review. So pull up a comfy chair, pretend you have amnesia, and we never spoke of this.

The Rhythm of the Saints

Youth often regards the wisdom of the saints with distrust, even outright scorn. Matriculants to Generation Z (born ‘97-2012) wield a hypersensitive bullshit detector that tintinnabulates warily any time sainthood is bestowed upon a public figure. In their experience, such canonizations are usually closely followed by cancellations. That societal trauma explains some of the distrust many younger readers have about Elizabeth Strout’s Booker shortlisted novel The Things We Never Say, but it did not deter Strout’s earnest canonization of her hero, high school history teacher Artie Dam.

Evie spoke afterward of Artie always in terms of his being a saint. He was a saint, she said this again and again as she lived the rest of her life, never marrying again. An absolute saint, she said. Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say.

Evie’s hagiographic reverence for her awkwardly honest spouse is more than widow’s warmth. Substack’s Ron Charles reports that Strout herself provided authorial approval of Evie’s posthumous assessment, saying “This Artie, I love him.”

I wonder if Strout is deliberately echoing Victorian fictionist George Eliot, whose favorable comparison of her Middlemarch heroine Dorothea Brooke to Saint Theresa was the thematic spine of that novel.

Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity. George Eliot, Middlemarch

The everyday sainthood of both protagonists emanates not from extravagantly pious deeds but from self-effacing acceptance of their flawed fellow travelers. Dorothea saves the day because she sees Tertius Lydgate’s scientific dedication instead of his implicating insolvency, Rosamond Vincy’s vulnerability instead of her henpecking manipulativeness, Will Ladislaw’s tenacious decency instead of his prickly egotism.

Artie has the same moral x-ray vision. Evie initially thinks he is “soft” for telling an awkward student that the world can be changed by personal authenticity. But she comes to see toughness in Artie’s saintly ability to turn a bully into a Shakespeare scholar. Or a Trump supporter into his most trusted confidant. By the novel’s conclusion, Artie — hang on, his confidant was what now??

If that last example instinctively feels like a bridge too far into MAGA apologia, you may have the same difficulty swallowing Strout that Gen Z BookTokkers have been voicing as The Things We Never Say laps the track toward the November 9 announcement of the 2026 Booker Prize winner. Mind you, I am a Gen X liberal (born ‘65-‘80) who still feels sadness over Charlie Rose’s absence from late night television, who can’t help finding George W. Bush a wee bit adorable when he pals around with Michelle Obama, who maintains a reservoir of affection for Woody Allen’s films despite decades of red-flag marriage to his own stepdaughter and damning allegations of worse. But even I took a good long look at Strout’s empathetic bridge to Trumpists before I reluctantly followed Artie across it.

Strout’s exploration of the power of empathy to make saints of us all is less palatable to some observers because she uses the 2024 US presidential election as a thematic backdrop. Many readers cringe at the application of literary compassion to the sphere of cable news, especially those among us who paused homework assignments to watch the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and the George Floyd protests. I am more willing to grant Judgement Day apokatastasis to the followers of a reckless regime that has done as-yet-untallied damage to our Republic. But my argument here is narrower: The Things We Never Say is bold in its politics and mild in its artistic ambition.

Parsing a Mixed Reception

Saintly Artie Dam, every student’s favorite history teacher, is 57 when voters send the Charlottesville President, the “Enemy of the People” President, the Bleach Injection President, the “Cats and Dogs” President back to the People’s House. That day takes place roughly halfway through the 201-page novel. The election does not drive the plot, but it looms over the quiet family narrative with nearly the same menace that Nazism asserts in Philip Roth’s Lindbergh-beats-FDR alternative history The Plot Against America (2004).

In The Things We Never Say, Trumpism is the invisible white hood in the midst of a brawl over antisemitic comments at a soccer game at Artie’s school. It seeps into the loneliness that makes Artie indulge suicidal and kleptomaniac impulses. It is the context that darkens Artie’s discovery that his beloved son Rob was conceived by a jackass math teacher with a “stable genius” ego. Put differently, Trumpism is not the story of the novel, but it is the novel’s underlying subject. Late in the book, Strout highlights the connection in crimson:

Artie had watched as the new president sneeringly humiliated the leader of Ukraine in the Oval Office. He listened with horror as the man said he would like to make Gaza “the new French Riviera.” He watched as the president deported people to foreign prisons and arrested students who had spoken out against the war in Gaza, students who could have been Artie’s a few years earlier, just taken off the streets. … He watched as people in Gaza starved and the United States did nothing about it. Every day brought something new. On and on it went. Artie watched all these things, and he slowly understood that what he had felt the day of the election was true: His country was committing suicide. Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say

This metaphor of self-evisceration feels somehow both imprecise, particularly in resistant Blue America (the novel is set in Massachusetts), and unartfully direct. But the line Strout draws between Artie’s sense of loss and today’s cable news scroll could not be more stark.

Not surprisingly, The Things We Never Say, steeped as it is in page one politics, has divided our nation’s book communities, with older readers largely split between those who loved the book and those who disliked the overt politics. Charles, a Boomer close to Strout’s age, suggested that The Things We Never Say deserved longevity equal to that of Stoner by John Williams. This is itself a pretty audacious assessment, since Stoner is as popular on BookTok as The Great Gatsby is in American Literature courses. The Boston Globe’s Priscilla Gilman, a Gen X-er born three years before me, argued that the political content diminished a usually reliable author. “The fiction seems to lose its bearings on the way to becoming parable or allegory,” Gilman claimed.

I have not studied all of the 14,069 reviews that have already been posted on Goodreads as I write this, but the generational divide appears as soon as you probe for it. Search for “too political,” and 2,800 reviewers turn up, most my age or older. Mary Lins, a 69-year-old Strout diehard from Jefferson City, Missouri, “kept reading, hoping that once she’d ’had her say’ the book would concentrate more on the characters and plot (which is riveting), but the political doom and gloom continue throughout.”

Okay, Boomer.

Younger Goodreads and BookTok reviewers did not share my generation’s queasy unreadiness for political fisticuffs. Alfie Tindall, a 24-year-old parasitologist-in-training from Glasgow, who is known on TikTok as Alfread, is particularly effective at voicing the view of The Things We Never Say that I encountered again and again from Gen Z critics. “I think reading is one of the most political things that we can do,” he began, “and I commend authors who are bold enough to dive into conversations about current affairs.”

To Alfread, Strout had written “about 200 pages of centrism and fence-sitting.” Her engagement amounted to appeasement for mainstream audiences, and she refused to allow her characters to “commit to any kind of political take.” Her references to Gaza could have been designed to “educate” her readers but instead dodged an obligation to call a spade a spade. Alfread is methodically precise: a United Nations commission has investigated Gaza and has determined it fits four of five criteria for genocide. Why then can’t Strout use that word in the novel?

Alfread also called Strout out for a “both-sidesy” tendency to equate Israel and Gaza while clearly attributing responsibility for the Ukraine conflict to Russian aggression. Alfread’s controlled fury cleanly articulated his generation’s impatience with moral prevarication. His critique of Strout echoed the words of Jesus in Revelation: “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

I give Alfread a lot of credit for his openness to this debate. I sent an email across the Atlantic last weekend, and he wrote back within ten minutes: “Differences in opinion are what make book discussion so interesting and I’m sure there is a generational aspect behind it that I’d love to see you explore.”

Watch Alfread’s video here!

Who’s Afraid of George Eliot?

To [Lytton] Strachey, as well as to other intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century, [Victorian novelist George] Eliot was part of a bygone era that was the better for being gone. The falling-off of regard was precipitous. Almost immediately after Eliot’s death critics vied with each other to demonstrate their own vitality by thinking up new ways to characterize her deadliness. “It is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels,” one critic wrote of her works. … In 1895 George Saintsbury was able to note that while her novels might still be read, they were not admired by anyone whose opinion counted for anything. (Saintsbury was a well-known literary critic, whom no one now reads.) Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

In her own time, Eliot was adulated for her penetrating moral wisdom. No less an embodiment of the Victorian Era than Queen Victoria herself actively sought Eliot’s autograph. Victoria’s heir, Edward VII, read Middlemarch 15 times in 15 years. Even the novelist known as The Master, Henry James, who condescendingly denigrated Eliot’s storytelling capabilities, conceded of her fiction that “much should be forgiven it for the sake of its generous feeling and its elevated morality.”

However, what passed for lofty moral insight during the 1870s seemed insufferably credulous in some social circles at the turn of the century. “She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at,” wrote Virginia Woolf, “the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn.” Obsessively judgy Victorian moralism was a strangulating corset to Woolf’s generation, and perhaps her contemporaries, like the progressive Bloomsbury Group (Woolf’s vaunted literary clique), suspected Eliot, for all her agnostic humanism, of secretly wanting to bind that corset inextricably to their hips. Woolf herself pushed back on that cynicism, giving Eliot credit for a rare willingness to target Middlemarch at “grown-up people.” But even Woolf confessed “bursting into laughter” at one of Eliot’s earnest dictums.

In May 2026, The Guardian put an exclamation point on Eliot’s subsequent recovery from Edwardian ignominy by naming Middlemarch the single greatest novel in the history of the form. In other words, Strout could dunk on all five of the other shortlisted novels and still fail to lay a pinkie finger on Eliot’s signature creation. Put another way, any 21st century novelist who hopes to rise to Eliot’s level has their work cut out for them. Eliot’s best defense may have been scripted by her contemporary Oscar Wilde in the last line of his own magnum opus. Wilde was just beginning to find himself in fiction when real-world cruelty stripped him of dignity and broke his extravagant heart. Is Eliot an outmoded purveyor of sentimental sap, Oscar?

“On the contrary, … I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being earnest.”

Condemned to Repeat It

Setting aside the Booker-season impulse to rank everything, however, there are interesting parallels between the two works beyond their generational fault lines. As we have seen, both books elevate their protagonists to sainthood for generous but ordinary acts of compassion. Beyond that, both present a seismic national vote as a thematic backdrop.

For Strout, Trump’s creep back from pandemic-era ostracization catalyzes a cultural coarsening. A student slings a homophobic slur at Artie for confiscating student cellphones, but it is Artie who is called on the carpet for his method of discipline. Later, Artie is scolded by a pharisaic administrator on the Left. “Not only is it demeaning for your students to be called boys and girls, but you are not even sure that they are all male and female. There may be students who are neither.” In both cases, saintly Artie turns the other cheek.

For Eliot, the 1832 Reform Act’s incremental democratization of Parliamentary elections remediates class inequities that have troubled Dorothea since Chapter I of LXXXVI. Her uncle, Arthur Brooke, is a blitheringly good-natured Trump, a landlord-turned-pol who seeks public office on a self-serving platform marketed as Reform.

In Eliot’s era, the progressives prevail. Uncle Arthur’s stump speech is shouted down by working class malcontents: “Blast your ideas! we want the Bill!” In our own era, Uncle Trump cons crowds into thinking he is a Working Class Hero. The backdrops are inverted, but both celebrate the quiet dignity of compassion.

Our counterculture youth find Artie politically wishy-washy for roughly the same reason that Woolf’s too-cool-for-school Bloomsbury crew scoffed at wide-eyed Dorothea: their versions of progress are too slow! In 2026, Alfread has no time for saintly Artie’s empathetic interest in Elon Musk’s biography. In 1890, twenty-something critic W.E. Henley dismissed Eliot as a prude: “George Sand plus Science and minus Sex!”

To some extent it was ever thus, and that’s the way it should be. When Strout was Alfread’s age, her Baby Boomers (born ‘46-‘64) applied withering Bloomsbury hindsight to Jim Crow, the Vietnam War, and married couples with matching twin beds. Now Gen Z largely regards those one-time hippies as phonies who long ago sold the Woodstock farm in exchange for bourgeois comforts. I hope they all hold my generation accountable for favoring Trump by a double-digit margin. Thanks, peers. Don’t blame me if reality bites!

Hot Take — So Please Don’t Spit Me Out!

I find the readily discernible generational fault lines over The Things We Never Say fascinating, but I have trouble seeing my own view in almost any of the reviews I encountered. Like Alfread, I regard Strout’s willingness to take on a divisive political conversation as a strength rather than a liability. I am far more persuaded by Alfread’s bold political standards than Gilman’s aversion to allegory.

I am also aligned with Alfread in that I am not as enthusiastic about Strout’s character work and prose as Ron Charles. In fact, without Strout’s ominous invocation of the current creeping, tendril-clutch spread of Fascism, I would have found Strout’s depiction of an everyday saint quietly making a difference in the lives of his students tepid and clichéd.

Artie is a pleasure to meet, and I enjoyed his unabashed awkwardness. I like that he is more principled than clever, and I admire the way Strout juxtaposes his teacherly wisdom with silent, self-probing doubt. But for all that, there is a patness and perfection and thinness to the characterization that was never one of George Eliot’s shortcomings. If we are to pit Strout’s saint against Eliot’s, I will choose Dorothea’s brash naïveté and pained romantic timidity every time. The heartbeat of her characterization betrays an unplanned arrhythmia that leaps off the page. I never got that feeling from Artie Dam.

Where I part ways with Alfread is in his principled rejection of Strout’s genuine political audacity. His diagnosis of “both-sidesism” does not hold up to scrutiny. He argues that Artie becomes suicidal because “divisive political times” “overwhelm” his “mental health.” But the word “divisive” (and its variations) do not appear in the book at all. To Strout, suicide isn’t a cost of disagreement; it is a metaphor for the nation’s capitulation to Trump: “His country was committing suicide.” How is that “fence-sitting”?

As for the charge of “appeasement,” Strout’s political punch is restrained not by a desire to please Mary Lins or me or Alfread (after all, she clearly hasn’t) but by the same force that hushes her matter-of-fact prose. She isn’t a showy or performative writer, and, honestly, she is sometimes more direct than she needs to be. For purely aesthetic reasons, Strout could stand to lean harder on metaphor and abstraction and even less on political manifesto. Alfread demands that Strout reflect his own moral certainty. But the characters in her custody are not as well-informed as he is. This approach has a legitimate authorial defense: Steely resolution is not as dramatically compelling as doubt.

Alfread is right to demand ideological authenticity, to have horror called by its own horrific name. The reason to demand that “genocide” be named as such is that its legalistic accuracy stamps out the obfuscating power of euphemism. Politicians use language as a roadblock, to evade reality in craven subservience to the criminal Netanyahu regime. But Strout has already indicted the United States for letting Gazans starve. She has acknowledged that Netanyahu bombs children to prolong his hold on power, and to obstruct corruption charges in the Israeli courts. She has let true suffering breathe inside her make-believe. In that context, Alfread’s demand for a password strikes me as borderline unliterary. “Genocide” has an undeniable currency in politics, but fiction can employ a broader vocabulary. It should not be shackled to literalistic rigidity.

She may be earnest, but I hope there is a timelessness to Eliot’s priorities. “The only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings,” wrote George Eliot, “is that those who read them should be better able to imagine and to feel the pains and the joys of those who differ from them in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures.” If we cannot recognize the humanity of the inhumane, even in imagination, our own humanity is called on the carpet. My point is not that fictional empathy pulls rank on real-world reckoning. Real-world anything outranks fictional anything. In the real world. But fiction has to be distinct, a space where imagination issues temporary pardons at the expense of real-world rage.

Of course, this is all my hot take, the perspective of a Gen Xer who has already described himself as a “liberal.” That label has probably already cost me the trust of some in Gen Z, who tend not to hear the same meaning in that word that my peers do. I would simply submit that “too political” and “not political enough” can themselves be euphemisms for “not fully aligned with my politics.” We should recognize that Strout is out on a limb regardless of where we are in the tree.

My thanks to Alfie Tindall.