It is both a comfort and a discomfort to yield to a new novel from Elizabeth Strout, who writes with such perspicacity that any time spent in her world unsettles as much as it consoles. So it proves with The Things We Never Say, her 11th book and the first since My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) to feature a new character.

He is Artie Dam, a misunderstood 57-year-old history teacher from a Massachusetts coastal town. He is married, popular – ‘“Damn-dam, the greatest man,” his students would sometimes say to him’ – and likes nothing better than to take his sailing boat out in Massachusetts Bay. But it soon transpires that the joviality so treasured by his friends is a sham. ‘Artie’s secret was this: for more than two months he had been thinking how to kill himself without his wife or son (or students) knowing that he had done so,’ writes Strout, who uses the same winning free indirect approach to her third-person narration here as in her other books.

It is September 2024 and America’s incipient political reckoning – or re-reckoning – is not helping Artie’s mental state. He is frustrated about the things we don’t say: ‘I wonder why people never say anything real,’ he remarks to his wife Evie after an evening at a friend’s party. ‘Why can’t anybody talk about what’s really happening?’, he continues, a question that takes on more significance after an unexpected revelation from their son Rob.

Artie is consumed by the question of free will and the role of the unconscious in determining our actions, which feels like Strout’s way of fathoming the position her country finds itself in. Small episodes illuminate a bigger picture, such as a fight that breaks out at a school soccer game because the referee had called something in favour of a child with a Jewish surname.

Strout’s superpower is reminding readers that there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Everyone is battling something, even if we don’t broadcast it. Writing about the inner lives and struggles of small-town characters – the affairs, deaths, illnesses and suicidal thoughts that plague many of us – gives her stories a remarkable unifying quality. Take how she introduces a disaster involving Rob. ‘As many people do, Artie and Evie had suffered a tragedy,’ she says about an accident ten years previously, when their son crashed the car he was driving, killing his girlfriend.

After the claustrophobia of Strout’s previous book, Tell Me Everything, which united many of her protagonists but required too much rehashing of back stories for my liking, the injection of new characters here is refreshing. It also helps the author to get away with doubling down on familiar themes, such as loneliness and how the small connections we make in this world sustain us. Above all, through Artie, she makes us realise how it is ‘a private thing, to be alive’. And that’s something we have to learn to live with.