As usual, Strout manages to create scenes of intense intimacy in prose that feels as casual and comfortable as your favorite flannel shirt. She’s just so damn good ... Reading these pages, I was repeatedly awed by her restraint, her willingness to let sentimentality evaporate in the hard light of her prose ... Reflecting its airy plot, Strout has structured The Things We Never Say with appropriate looseness — almost as a collage, a series of short passages, sometimes a few pages, sometimes just three or four lines. The effect is impressionistic while providing the gentlest forward momentum.
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She’s not a minimalist, but Elizabeth Strout does more with less than any writer I can think of ... Strout’s scene-setting is brilliantly terse and precise ... Complex and layered.
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Glorious ... Full of tiny interactions that buoy her characters ... The people in Things — like people in real life — tend not to unburden themselves of their feelings; they clench them in. And, not surprisingly, that’s not healthy ... Strout never overreaches with her writing, which is built on the emotional progress her characters achieve when they genuinely connect ... Strout is not a sentimental writer. The folks in her books don’t automatically become happy because they open up to each other ... But Strout does offer her characters hope.
